October 19

Last Wednesday, we went on our field trip to the Kentucky History Museum in Frankfort! The quote on the building says, "...so all Kentuckians may discover their roots in time and place."


The kids and Daddy standing on a model of a boat pioneers used to travel down the Ohio river to get to Kentucky.


They wanted their picture taken in front of every quilt. There were a lot of quilts!


My friend, John G. Fee. I just had to take his picture.


TJ writes: This is Abraham Lincolns REAL watch. The watches back then are different then the watches of our time.

Abraham Lincoln was born near Hodgenville, KY, on Feb. 12, 1809. He died at age 56. His family left KY 7 years later.

When Lincoln was talking about the Civil War, he said:
"I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game..."
Abraham Lincoln, 1861


David wanted his picture taken in front of this crazy quilt. Crazy boy, crazy quilt.


What can I say. We like quilts.


Jessie wanted to take this picture of a Victorian-style living room.


A piece of Kentucky coal.


Authentic moonshine still. Ha ha!


Coal miner's equipment. They had a big section for coal mining, including a set-up of a company store with a display of scrip. Tim explained it all to the kids. They decided the company stores were a rip-off. After you got paid your scrip and bought your stuff, you didn't have much money left.


Coal camp in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky.


Jessie writes: This is David in front of one of my favorite quilts at the museum. It was made by a little girl, but that girl did not finish it until she was around fifty years old (I think). The top of the quilt took her a few years to make. She started at the age of eight and she was about ten or eleven when she finished the top. If you look at the quilt closely,you can see that the pieces are very small.She finished the whole thing when she was around fifty, or fifty five years old, at the beginning of World War II. I learned that a lot of the only blankets that they had back then were pretty much all quilts, even though they all took extremely long to make. Back then,
materials for quilts were expensive, so sometime people, when they made quilts, used old clothes, or any other cloths.


Swinging bridge over a creek at a home in the mountains. You can still see bridges like this in Eastern Kentucky. We all walked across one before!


Small tobacco farm in the mountains.


This is the ACTUAL CAR that Bobby Kennedy rode in during his famous tour of Eastern Kentucky.


When we got to the exhibit about Kentucky in the '50s, '60s and '70s, Tim stared at this TV for a long time. "I had one that looked just like this growing up!" he said. I took a picture and didn't know until I went back that I had caught Colonel Sanders on the screen!


When we left, Tim took a picture of us standing on Madison County on the Kentucky floor map in the foyer. Then we went and got ice cream. It was a good day!

October 5

Today we started focusing on Kentucky specifically by studying Kentucky history using the book Faces of Kentucky by James and Freda Klotter.



This is one of the better textbooks I have seen in ANY subject area. All three of the kids sit and listen for the most part, although David sometimes listens upside down with his legs in the air. We have started by reading about the first Native Americans in the region. Interestingly enough (this is something even I didn't know) when the majority of European settlers came to Kentucky, there were very few Indians living here. Almost all of them had died out due to disease. Kentucky was mostly just a hunting ground that Indians from Ohio or other areas passed through on hunting trips.

This book has also inspired us to try and schedule a day to visit the Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History in Frankfort. If we go, we will be sure to take pictures and blog about it.

We also have discussed our projects that Jessie and TJ will each have to do at the end of each semester. Here's their list of options:

1. Write an essay titled "Why I am Proud to be an Appalachian."
2. Write a poem about Appalachia.
3. Create a portfolio of photography on an Appalachian theme.
4. Write and perform a bluegrass song on a traditional instrument.
5. Create a handmade craft in an area of traditional Apppalachian art/craft.
6. Interview a person who grew up in the mountains and write an article or blog about their life.

Each student chooses one project to complete in the fall and one in the spring. So far, it looks like they both want to do a photography project, Jessie wants to do a handcraft, and T.J. wants to do an interview. This should be interesting.