Historic Sites
The Mission of the Preservation and Education Committee is to “Forward the purpose of M-WTCA as it Relates to Museums and Historic Sites.”
This is being accomplished in a number of ways, including direct funding as well as through many of our members who give of their time, experience, and talents to volunteer at museums and historic sites. Whether you are a M-WTCA member of somebody just visiting our site, please consider contacting such places in your area and see what you may be able to do for them. Most all use volunteers and can use your help. For more information about this important project, contact the Chairman of the Preservation & Education Committee.
Mount Vernon
In addition to M-WTCA supporting an intern in a 10-week summer program, our members have provided expertise in assisting in dating antique tools in their collection, in providing restoration expertise and in building authentic reproductions of trades related items including building a workbench for the gristmill.
Thomas Day House
Thomas Day was a free man of color living and working in Milton, North Carolina in the early to mid 1800s. He had the largest furniture making shop in the state and was very well respected within the region.
Several members of M-WTCA including Bill Anderson, Brian Coe, Ed Hobbs, and Roy Underhill have planned, designed, and made by hand a historically accurate reproduction of a nineteenth-century cabinetmaker’s workbench stocked with period tools. The workbench and tool display can be seen at the Thomas Day House/Union Tavern in Milton, North Carolina. Here is a link to a video of the building of that workbench.
For additional information on Thomas Day, please visit:
http://www.halifaxcountyhistoricalsociety.org
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ncccha/biographies/thomasday.html
Tobacco Farm Life Museum
The Tobacco Farm Life Museum (TFLM) is located in Kenly, North Carolina, just off I95 at Exit 107 depicts rural life in the state from the late 1800s to the mid 1900s.
M-WTCA has outfitted the TFLM’s Farm Shop with blacksmithing equipment, woodworking tools, and installed a working line shaft (link to video) typical of what would have been found in the early 1930s to power a metal lathe. In addition, the museum has a large main building with displays of all sorts of farm and rural life items, a tobacco barn, pack house, tenant house, and a typical farmhouse. To find out more, please visit:
Stratford Hall
Members from M-WTCA worked with the staff to build an authentic, period reproduction of a workbench for the farm shop at Stratford Hall. In addition, members donated over one hundred eighteenth-century tools to give the shop an authentic period appearance as well as a treadle wood lathe. Click on the following links to see pictures of this project, a short video of the lathe and the Stratford Hall website.
Textile Heritage Museum – Glencoe Mills
Area Q (North Carolina) members contributed expertise and funds to the museum.