Local museum features hands-on learning program to highlight history
Herald-Standard
Pictured is West Overton Village & Museums.
Greg Evanina
West Overton Village & Museums Director of Education Aaron Hollis, right, is pictured showing Lily Rowles of Scottdale how to wash linens by hand at the DIY History’s laundry exhibit, which also featured a functioning 1920 electric washing machine. Lily’s siblings, Evelyn and Logan, also got in on the sudsy action.
Making their way around the exhibits of the West Overton Village & Museums, the Stimmel family of Connellsville stopped for a photo in front of the distillery, which was built in 1859. From left are Curtis, Morgan, Curtis III and Melinda Stimmel.
Greg Evanina
Visitors to the West Overton Village & Museums in Scottdale had the opportunity recently to touch, smell and taste parts of the past as they learned about life at this former rye whiskey distillery, farm and coke-making facility, which is also the birthplace of Henry Clay Frick.
Aaron Hollis, the director of education, decided to offer DIY events to make history “more interactive, more exciting.” He said, “A lot of us look back at our high school days and see how boring high school history class was. It’s all lecture.”
“We all learn better by doing,” said Hollis, who gave his museum-goers the unique experiences of churning their own butter, hand-washing laundry, cooking potato pancakes on an open hearth, and playing 19th-century games. Besides learning about life in the 1800s, he said each activity also taught other lessons, such as the science of turning cream into butter and changes in laundry technology from manual to Maytag.
For an admission fee of $5 per person and $15 for a family, each visitor received a “passport” and a guided walking tour about the history of village, the buildings and the people who lived in them. As they made their way around West Overton, visitors got to sample their own freshly made butter and potato pancakes.
The passport, which Hollis designed to resemble an immigrant’s registration card, had spaces for name, age and favorite of the four activities. On the other side were four corresponding squares where participants placed an inked fingerprint to prove they had visited each activity. A completed passport with four “stamps” got the holder a frozen watermelon treat.
“So, we’re not just watching and listening,” said Hollis, who was pleased by the turnout and plans to make DIY History a regular occurrence. The fall event, which will include pressing apples for cider and making sauerkraut, is scheduled for Oct. 14.
He said, “We’re doing things with our hands. We’re smelling. We’re tasting. We’re learning so much better, and that’s what prompted me to do these hands-on DIY History events.”
“Walking gets them experiencing other buildings in the village,” Hollis said, “but it also gets them reading this book, and they’re learning the history of this site, even though they’re not actively realizing it.”
He noted that a big part of the museum’s history is entrepreneurialism and industrialization.
The Henry Overholt family moved to the area in 1803 and continued to grow throughout the 1800s, so the collection spans the century. The first business conducted at the village was distilling rye whiskey in a very small distillery built from logs. By 1803, Henry owned 260 acres along what is now Route 819 between the communities of Scottdale and Mount Pleasant.
Henry’s son, Abraham, was a master weaver who then became an elder in the Mennonite Church. He also began the commercial distilling operation at West Overton that included Old Farm Pure Rye Whiskey. Old Overholt, reputed to be America’s oldest continually maintained brand of whiskey, is still sold in liquor stores today, although Jim Beam now owns the name.
Standing outside the distillery building, Melinda Stimmel of Connellsville said she brought her children Curtis and Morgan to West Overton for a scavenger hunt a few years ago and decided to come to the DIY History event after seeing Hollis in the library.
“For $15 a family, it was something very fun and affordable,” said Stimmel, who said they had been there for about an hour.
“I made butter,” Morgan said. “It was actually really cool because I was surprised it turned into butter. First, it started as cream, and when you shook it for 10 minutes, it turned into butter.”
“They have some really cool games back there,” she continued. “They have some old-fashioned games. I got to play tug of war, and I really liked that one.”
When asked if she would have liked to have lived back in the 1800s, Morgan said confidently, “I can totally imagine myself here.”
But her mom had a different opinion: “You wouldn’t last one day, honey.”