Funk Heritage Center
By SHERRI SMITH BROWN
Numerous exhibits and dioramas depicting the timeline of Southeastern Indians can be viewed at the Funk Heritage Center.
Celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, the Funk Heritage Center at Reinhardt College in Waleska is Georgia’s “Official Frontier and Southeastern Indian Interpretive Center,” and it lives up to its designation.
The Center consists of the Bennett History Museum – a 7,000-square-foot exhibit space with a theater and museum store – and an Appalachian Settlement with relocated authentic log cabins and other 19th century farm buildings. All total, the Center houses more than 6,000 artifacts donated by area collectors, most of them illustrative of the area’s many Indian cultures.
In the area of the museum known as the Long House, there are artifacts and text panels telling the story of the earliest encounters between Europeans and the people of the Southeast. You can also view a 15-minute film on the Southeastern Indians. In the Hall of Ancients exhibit area, you will see dioramas depicting the Paleo, Archaic, Woodland, Mississippian and Historic periods as well as a timeline, maps and information about the Cherokee Indian removal from Georgia during the 1830s known as the Trail of Tears. The centerpiece of this area is a granite petroglyph that is 11 feet long, 5 feel wide and 1.5 feet thick. This ancient and mysterious carved rock was found years ago on a farm in the Hickory Log area of Cherokee County near the Etowah River about four miles north of Canton.
The museum also houses the Sellers Collection of Historic Tools, which includes thousands of tools dating from as early as the 17th century, and the Rogers Gallery of Contemporary American Indian Art. Here, you can view paintings, sculptures and other creative works – a majority created by descendants of the Southeastern Indians who were removed during the Trail of Tears.
Located on the grounds of the Funk Heritage Center is the Appalachian Settlement, which is designed to interpret the pioneer experience. It consists of the Beavers Cabin – a typical one-room cabin with a loft, which was usually the first structure built on a homestead. This cabin was found in the Macedonia area of Cherokee County. A second log cabin, the Cline Cabin, was found in the Salacoa Valley and is used as a woodwright’s cabin, a combination residence and woodworking shop, where furniture, tools and other wooden items were made. Other structures in the settlement are a blacksmith shop, syrup mill, grain crib, ‘tater house, and threshing floor as well as a truss bridge and a kingpost bridge.
Read more about Native American History and Cherokee County, or find more activities in the Northwest Georgia Mountains Travel Region here at Brown’s Guide.
Tags: art, artifacts, Cherokee County, museum, Native Americans