Bringing History to Life: Creating a Living History Program at the Tobacco Farm Life Museum

FAIN: ZED-283729-22

Tobacco Farm Life Museum, Inc. (Kenly, NC 27542-0088)
Elizabeth Nevarez (Project Director: May 2021 to January 2026)

To support salaries, training, and historically accurate costumes for the Living History interpreters at the Tobacco Farm Life Museum.

The Tobacco Farm Life Museum would like to initiate a living history program to help create an interactive, immersive educational experience for our visitors. The project would utilize grant funds to hire, train, and provide historically accurate clothing to historical interpreters who would provide living history interpretation to visitors to the museum's historic and reproduction buildings on its grounds. Living history would attract more visitors to the museum and add to the experience of visiting the museum's historic buildings including an early 20th-century homestead with detached kitchen and smokehouse, a tobacco barn, and a one-room schoolhouse, as well as a reproduction packhouse (farm building) and a reproduction, but functioning, blacksmith shop. Living history would also provide a more personal narrative, helping visitors to connect and relate to the history interpreted at the museum (farm life in North Carolina from 1880-1950).