Museum of Appalachia

John Rice Irwin, an East Tennessee educator and businessman born in 1930, started the museum in the 1960s and opened it to the public in 1969. It now covers about 65 acres a short drive north of Knoxville, with some 35 log cabins, barns, churches and schools, and more than 250,000 artifacts in three buildings: folk art, musical instruments, baskets, quilts and Native American objects. It is a nonprofit and a Smithsonian Affiliate.

Many of the buildings were moved here from across the region. The Arnwine Cabin, built of hewn poplar logs between 1795 and 1820, came in 1964 and is on the National Register of Historic Places. A cabin believed to have belonged to John Clemens, the father of Mark Twain, arrived in 1995 from Fentress County. The Peters Homestead house, dating from about 1790 to 1838, came from near Luttrell. Look for the Knight Family Chair, a rocking chair charred in a 1943 plane crash in Greensboro, North Carolina, that killed five people in the household and the pilot.

Read it as one man's collection, built from one point of view. The cabins and tools belonged to families who farmed these ridges, and the museum lets them speak through objects rather than a timeline, so bring your own questions about who is not in the rows of cabins. A restaurant on the grounds serves Southern Appalachian cooking, and Norris Dam and the Lenoir Museum are a few miles up the road.