John Rice Irwin did not have a vision. This is what he tells people when they ask, which they all eventually do, because one does not behold the kaleidoscope of memoir and memento that is Irwin’s Museum of Appalachia without wondering just how such a place came to exist. It would be like meeting a unicorn and not asking about the horn.

Irwin, who is eighty-one, came from intrepid East Tennessee mountain stock, a family of pioneers who either made what they needed or made do without. As a boy he heard tales from his Grandfather Rice of local scalpings and hangings while the two sawed and dressed wood, made apple cider vinegar, or butchered hogs. Immersed in mountain life, Irwin internalized the rhythm of hard work and hardship, the mercy and ambivalence of nature, a foundation he carried with him his entire life, so much so that even as he embraced other professions—teacher, real estate entrepreneur, businessman—his history was foremost in his mind.

So present was the past that Irwin began collecting things. Small items at first. A discarded family coffee grinder. A horseshoeing box rescued from the 1916 Barren Creek flood. He brought his treasures to his home in Norris, sixteen miles north of Knoxville. Soon enough larger relics joined the spinning wheels and butter churns, a development that initially did not sit well with his wife.

“We had a garage for the collections,” remembers Irwin’s daughter Elaine Meyer, the museum’s current president. “When we outgrew the garage, we expanded into the driveway, storing stuff under a giant tarp. My mom did not like that.”

Irwin initially solved the space dilemma by purchasing a local pioneer cabin—a two-room building that once housed a family of fourteen—reassembling it on his property, and furnishing it with period-specific pieces, a project he believed would satiate his appetite but in fact did the opposite.

“I went wild,” Irwin says wryly. “Preservation became an obsession of sorts. I went a little overboard with the whole thing.”

In 1969, Irwin set up a gas station bell that would ring when people drove up to investigate the “collection.” He charged fifty cents per person. And so it was the Museum of Appalachia was born.