By Taylor Boyd
The Smithsonian Institute Exhibit “Crossroads: Change in Rural America’ has come to Patrick County for a limited time.
Patrick County Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Rebecca Adcock said the exhibit is part of Museum on Main Street (MoMS), a traveling exhibit in collaboration between the Smithsonian, Virginia Humanities, and Virginia Association of Museums (VAM).
Adcock said the exhibit is comprised of five pods, each with a different theme, and the Crossroads welcome sign.
“Land, identity, your community, managing change, and each pod talks about that. It is rural America, so it pulls from the Midwest to the West, Southwest, as well as rural Appalachia,” she said.
Adcock said the locality created contributing exhibits to complement with the Crossroads exhibit.
“The Extension Office put out a call for old recipes, so they have ‘Stirring up Old Memories.’ We also have Bull Mountain Arts, who decided to make these little houses about what community means to you. They had multiple workshops where people could come in and paper-craft and put on things that exemplified what community meant to those individuals,” she said.
Other local contributions include a photography exhibit from different decades by the Patrick County Historical Society & Museum, tobacco prints from the Reynolds Homestead, and a display of books and DVDs about life in rural America by the Patrick County Branch of the Blue Ridge Regional Library. The display is located in the library and was completed earlier this week.
Adcock said her favorite part of the exhibit was the breadth of what it covers in such confined space. “Overall, they are not huge pods, but they do have a lot of information on them. I think they did a really fantastic job of capturing what it is to live in rural America and the challenges that we have to deal with,” she said.
She added that she also enjoyed the engineering aspect of the project and putting the exhibit together from the boxes.
Adcock said Lisa Martin, the former Senior Program Manager at the Reynolds Homestead, applied to get the exhibit during the summer. When Martin retired earlier this year, Sarah Wray, Assistant Program Coordinator for the Homestead, took over her role.
“So, it’s been a team effort with many other people,” she said.
While not part of the exhibit, Adcock said the chamber also has a large map of the area on the building’s back wall.
“The county got a Community Development Block Grant (CBDG) from the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture), and part of that is figuring out what to do with the Downtown area,” she said.
Several ideas that have been mentioned in meetings are listed and marked on the map. Adcock said the chamber encourages residents to write their ideas down or check listed ideas to help the chamber know which direction to go in with the funds received.
The exhibit is located in the chamber office in Downtown Stuart. It will be open through Saturday, Jan. 8, with regular exhibit hours of Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m., and Sunday from 12 to 4 p.m. Holiday hours can be found on the chamber website.
Admission is free.
For more information, visit www.patrickchamber.com, Facebook.com/PatrickCountyChamberofCommernce, or call the office at (276) 694-6012.
