Exhibits & Historic Buildings

Imagine a time when you and your family might have followed old Indian trails across rivers and through dense forests into the unpopulated mountains and hollows.  Think of all the risks.  You wanted to find a place to set up a farm and live independently, far removed from the political and religious forces that other American colonists had to obey.  You can sense that experience at the middle Appalachian region's most comprehensive cultural heritage museum.

Our unusual name derives from the Big Crab Orchard archaeological site on which the Museum was built. Here, Native Americans lived and hunted over thousands of years. The site included a palisaded late Woodland era settlement of what are believed to have been members of the Cherokee nation. The Museum protects the archaeological evidences of this site beneath the soil on a hayfield across a modern highway from the Museum site.

The first family to set up farming in this region, that of Thomas Witten, found the place to be rich with wild crabapple trees -- hence the name. The Wittens came to this site from Maryland around 1770. The archaeological site is on the Virginia and National Historical Site registers.  Around it, the once thriving Pisgah community also grew up and then declined by World War II.

The Museum offers ample parking adjacent to the Higginbotham Museum Center where your tour begins. Among other things, the Museum is the County’s Tourism Center and provides assistance and brochures for those interesting in seeing more of the region. We have knowledgeable and helpful staff and volunteers to greet you when you arrive.

In the Exhibition Gallery, you'll browse a carefully interpreted collection of rare and original maps, starting when European explorers thought the Pacific Ocean had its eastern shore in what is now West Virginia! Then we’ll take you through the history of one of America’s most interesting regions.

The entry Exploration exhibit tells you how long it took for early Americans and their cartographers to map out the Appalachian region. If you're from this area, you'll be interested to see how the names of many original towns were changed, or the towns which no longer exist. And you'll also see how much of the present State of West Virginia was part of Tazewell County until shortly before the Civil War.

In the Geology exhibit, see the Gastropod fossil, the remnant of a snail said to be 570 million years old. The leg bone, tusk, and teeth of a Woolly Mammoth (mastodon) found near here are perhaps 400 million years old. See how salt from the nearby mines looks no different than crystal-clear blocks of ice.

We exhibit wildlife from the region, including the American Bald Eagle, a famed coyote that plundered sheep farms here years ago, and the hide of the 500-pound black bear named "Old Hitler," who was shot in the early 1940s after killing dozens of cattle and sheep.

A distinctive exhibit area is set aside for the Native Americans, the first settlers, who came from Asia via the Bering Strait thousands of years ago and migrated eastward. We tell the story of the late Woodland period Indians who had a semi-permanent settlement just across the highway from the Museum.

A carefully made, authentic diorama shows how that settlement looked, based on archaeological evidence. Original pottery, tools, beadwork, ceremonial objects, and weapons are also displayed -- all having been found during the Big Crab Orchard Site archaeological study here in the 1970s and again in the 1980s. The ceremonial pipe shows that tobacco was grown here at least 600 years ago.

The first pioneers of European origin were called the "long hunters" for the long flintlock rifles they carried. The first known was Absalom Looney, who arrived from Rockbridge County in 1769 to hunt, trap, and dig ginseng in the area of the county now called Abbs Valley.

We show a bleeder, the medical instrument used to draw infected blood from the sick. There is a wooden pitchfork made from a small tree and its roots. Wooden buckets connected by a yoke were carried by the women to the river to collect water for home use. Books owned by Thomas Witten, the first farmer on this site, are also on exhibit, an example of the pioneers’ interest in education and the Bible. We own a rare drinking cup made from the burl, or knot, of a tree.

In our sections on Birth of a County and The Farm, we use original objects and decorative items to show how women worked in the fields and among the livestock, even while tending to their families and homes.

At home, the pioneer women worked the farm, but also created colorful heirlooms of wool and linen. They sheared the wool from the sheep and processed it into yarn; they thrashed and processed the flax to make linen. For coloring, they used dyes made from roots, berries and other vegetation. The Museum's collection of antique woven coverlets from Southwestern Virginia is not only the largest anywhere, it is unique -- each came to the Museum from its family of origin along with the stories handed down about how they were made and how they were used.

Settlers were Presbyterians from Ulster, Methodists from Wales and England, and Lutherans from Germany. Jeffersonville, now the Town of Tazewell, became the County Seat in 1800. The earliest Baptists settled in the area now called Baptist Valley, a few miles from the Museum. Those who came from eastern Europe to go into the coal mines were predominantly Roman Catholic. The exhibits tell the story of how these pioneers made worship a part of their daily lives.

In the 1850s, industrialization began to occur. Coal was discovered in Pocahontas. northern Tazewell County, by a blacksmith near his well-patronized shop. Soon, Norfolk and Western Railway lines were extended through Bluefield into the mountains to transport the coal to its eastern markets. Iron ore was also discovered in the Richlands area, leading to the planned development of that town as a potential "Pittsburgh of the South."

Pocahontas, now an historic landmark town with about 400 residents, once boomed at more than 5,000. Early developments in Richlands were never completed or were torn down, but in 1892 the Town began again to emerge as a project of the railroad industry. Coal mining in Tazewell County has been discontinued almost entirely.

The original telegraph from the Norfolk & Western terminal at North Tazewell may be operated by our visitors. And we also show how an industrial economy made it possible for families to acquire many things -- one of the County’s earliest "talking machines,” owned by a doctor in Clearfork.

Your leisurely tour through the galleries concludes with a turn of the century parlor setting. See a handmade bridal chest (ca. 1800) from Burke's Garden. Made near Wytheville by a father for his daughter, it is one of only 25 known examples of this particularly artistic cabinetmaker's work, and because it reflects a certain style reminiscent of a specific southeastern Pennsylvania community of craftsmen, has been featured in an article on The Magazine Antiques.

Finally, you’ll enjoy our current seasonal exhibit in the changing gallery and prepare to go out into the Pioneer Park. The seasonal exhibit themes range from the historical to the contemporary, all related to this region.

Historic Crab Orchard Museum’s Pioneer Park is the only reconstruction of historical buildings in western Virginia that are indigenous to their immediate vicinity. It continues to expand as owners make original buildings available to the Museum and the funds for reconstruction and restoration can be found.

It is in the Pioneer Park that many of our living history programs take place.  Some 90 volunteers a year help us with these activities, which we carry out for school and other groups, and during selected special events - the Spring Open House and the Appalachian Independence Day.

There is more to being outdoors at the Museum than its historical buildings, however. Our barn gallery has exhibits of early agricultural equipment (including one of two original replicas of the McCormick Reaper, invented in western Virginia), saddlery, wagons, a horsedrawn hearse, a working 1917 Model T Ford complete with an early gasoline pump and one of the last of the Linotypes, the machines used early this century to set type for newspapers and other printed matter.

The 15 structures in the Pioneer Park are all of log, log and stone, or stone. All are original, dating back to 1802, and have been relocated and reconstructed on the Museum grounds. Each is furnished and open daily. The Pioneer Park includes family dwellings, a cobbler's shop, a carpenter's shop, working blacksmith shop with its original bellows and anvil, kitchen, lardhouse, doctor's office/apothecary, loom house, apple house, spring house, smokehouse, a replicated barn and corncribs.

The pioneer buildings in our outdoor museum were dismantled from various areas in Tazewell and surrounding counties, and reconstructed on site beginning in the 1970s. The earliest, the Maj. David Peery cabin, dates to 1802.

Our newest additions are the Daniel-Murray Farmstead, two stories tall, finished in 1996; and the “Doc” Witten Cabin, finished in 1998. Because the Daniel-Murray Farmstead dates to about 1882, it is landscaped according to the style used then. The family owned its own coal mine and extensive farmland. Gradually, a representation of the original "crab orchard" is reaching maturity. The trees are especially bred, and of the type found in nature in the 18th century here.

In season, we grow crops -- but our corn, beans, tomatoes, squash, pumpkins, onions and cane are of the breeds cultivated 150 years ago and more. Near the Kitchen, we maintain an herb garden, and near the Loom House, a flax garden to provide material for linen. We continue to develop our horticultural demonstration plots as back bred seed and cuttings become available.

It is a small corner of the world that is removed from the hustle and bustle of twentieth century life, where the phones aren’t ringing, and where sheep and cattle can be found grazing on the nearby hillocks and meadows