By MIKE JAMES — The Independent
BOLTS FORK — The soft light from an overcast sky spilled through the window and the open door onto the faces of children watching Margaret Burns.
It was the only light in the kitchen of the reconstructed log cabin where Burns, wearing a white ruffled mob cap, demonstrated some of the cast-iron tools and utensils that made pioneer life a bit less harsh.
She showed them the spider, a deep covered skillet on a tripod, used for baking bread. Also a bedding lamp, a primitive sort of night light that used animal fat for fuel and rags for wicks. “They didn’t waste anything,” she said.
The lesson on pioneer household management was just one in a day of living history the children spent Wednesday at Wolfpen Woods, the rural Boyd County farm owned by Margaret Burns and her husband, retired Morehead State University professor Roland Burns.
All this week kids from schools in the Tri-State are stepping off their 21st century yellow buses into a world of the early 19th century, a world of hand-hewn logs, iron implements and home-grown foods.
Over the years, the Burnses have moved to the farm several log cabins dating to the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Every year, they and a cadre of friends, all history experts who thrive on recreating Kentucky’s pioneer past, bring history to life for school groups. In recent years, they have added days for the public to spend at the farm.
Now there are five cabins, a blacksmith shop, smoke house and other structures.
It is the 10th year for the presentation, said Roland Burns, who strolls the grounds wearing the tricorn hat, waistcoat, and white shirt of a 1790s gentleman. He carries a scrimshawed powder horn and musket, and the metal gorget suspended from a leather thong around his neck identifies him as a mid-level army officer.
He is expecting about 2,000 kids in all this year. The first year about 200 came out. Burns thinks school interest in his recreated settlement has grown because he and his associates reinforce the early Kentucky history that is part of the fourth- and eighth-grade curriculum.
Always a history buff, Burns remembers the serendipitous moment when, after a conversation with his wife about their love of log houses, they saw a cabin of the pioneer period in the process of being deconstructed.
That set in motion a years-long process of acquiring, disassembling, moving and re-assembling cabins on his Bolts Fork farm.
Over time, he recruited several of his friends, many of them re-enactors, to help flesh out the historical picture.
People like Dan Cutler, a retired Huntington firefighter, who roams Wolfpen Woods in a ruffled shirt, deerskin leggings and bare feet, his close-cropped head swathed with a cloth band with a deer-tail and turkey-feather roach tucked into it.
He portrays a Shawnee trader. “Everybody was a trader on the frontier,” he said. Authentic portrayals like his help interest kids in the past, he believes. “If they can see it, it makes them curious and they want to find out more,” he said.
“It’s a springboard, it’s real life history,” said Lisa Dyer, whose Boyd County seventh-graders were trying out maple syrup, the same sweetener pioneers used. Dyer was one of Burns’s students at MSU and has been bringing classes to Wolfpen Woods for the entire 10 years it’s been open to schools. “Kids take a glimpse back in time for a day,” she said.
Kali Mattingly and Calli Smith are students most days, but on Wednesday they were pioneer kids, helping make bread in an outdoor oven. Kali, a senior, modeled her character after one of her own ancestors from five generations back, while Calli, in seventh grade, called herself “a typical kid.”
Both clad in long dresses and white caps, they fell under the spell of history when they first came to Wolfpen Woods as elementary pupils, they said. “I love being in a different world for a few hours,” Kali said.
Calli hopes to be a teacher so she can tell the next generation of kids about history.
Wolfpen Woods will be open to the public from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $4; children under 5 admitted free.
From the Cannonsburg exit on I-64, drive south to Ky. 3 and then eight miles further south to Ky. 773. Then turn right and drive about three-fourths of a mile to the entrance.
