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Feature article
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Rocky Mount: Experience the Flavor of History without Opening a History Book
By
PINEY FLATS — There are books in almost any library which will tell you what Tennessee was like before it was a state.
Rocky Mount Living History Museum wants to show you.
“There are a lot of people who don’t know about the Southwest Territory,” said Deborah Montanti, director of programs at Rocky Mount. “It was actually the second territory created by the United States, behind the Northwest Territory.
“It’s odd to think of us as being the wild, wild west, but in 1770, we were.”
The state historic site is able to maintain some of that wild flavor thanks to former landowners with a sense of preservation and a cast of historical interpreters who live their parts when they’re at Rocky Mount.
The museum uses “living history” as a descriptive in its title for a reason: While the visitor’s center is modernized and electrified, one step out the back door and onto the grounds alters that reality and gives visitors a sense of what the capital of the Southwest Territory was like in 1791.
“We think we’re remarkably successful in doing that,” Montanti said. “Most people who go out that back door willfully suspend their disbelief.”
The two-story, log house built by William Cobb around 1770 is the centerpiece of the farm.
The logs are those from more than 200 years ago; the interior woodworking is also original. The museum added three other buildings on the farm — a kitchen, a weaving cabin and slaves’ quarters — that are not original to the grounds but are replicants of 18th-century structures.
Roaming about Rocky Mount on any given day are historical interpreters who dress in period clothing, carry out duties of the day and answer visitors’ questions about what life is — was — in 1791.
“We portray members of the Cobb family, their neighbors and their friends,” Montanti said. “So depending on what day you’re here, you might talk to Mr. or Mrs. Cobb or one of the Cobb children. On weekends, you might talk to a schoolmaster who has just moved into the area.”
It’s ironic that the Cobb farm would become the capital of the Southwest Territory because William Cobb was not a political animal. But 20 years after he built his log home at Rocky Mount, Cobb opened up his home to the governor of the Southwest Territory, William Blount, and Rocky Mount became the political center of what would eventually become Tennessee.
Blount would live at the Cobb farm for 18 months, and his driving goal during that time was to lead the Southwest Territory toward statehood. His task reached fruition in 1796 when Tennessee became a state.
The Cobb homestead eventually passed to the Massengill family, who continued to use the log cabin until 1958, making mostly exterior modifications such as clapboard siding and a tin roof which were later removed. Pauline DeFriece, a cousin of Rocky Mount owner John Massengill, believed the building should be a state-owned shrine to the early settlers of the region, so she precipitated the events that led Tennessee to purchase Rocky Mount.
It opened as a museum in 1962.
Rocky Mount offers self-guided tours that typically take from 90 minutes to two hours from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., daily through Dec. 13, when hours are shortened for the winter season.
The tour begins in Massengill Overmountain Museum, then an orientation video precedes a stroll on the historic grounds. Duck into the kitchen where interpreters cook with 18th-century cooking techniques and tools, and it might yield treats such as a gingerbread or sausage muffins cooked over an open fire. In the weaving room, interpreters can demonstrate the colonial techniques used to process flax and wool.
Visitors are welcome to roam the grounds as long as they want after paying admission; count on the average tour to take 90 minutes to two hours, even longer when Rocky Mount is holding one of its special events.
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