“Visitors tell me every day that this museum changed their life,” Meyer says. “They talk about their own families here. They read the cards and they remember.”

“Alex Haley actually lived here for a spell,” she says. “He loved the covered-dish suppers. He’d say, ‘I have a friend coming; can youdo one of those covered-dish dinners?’ And then the friend would come and it would be Henry Kissinger.”

Martin Sheen, Quincy Jones, Jane Fonda—even Oprah—have all paid visits to the museum. Not that this surprises Irwin.

“People are interested in people,” he says matter-of-factly. “You take any object however humble and connect it to a person, and you have something of interest.”

Which is to say, at root, the museum isn’t about the artifacts at all. It is about the men and women who created them, the early settlers who carved lives out of nothing, turning stumps to sap fires, wire to song.

Irwin tells the story of watching his Granny Irwin labor all day, peeling peaches, breaking beans, pinching dough to form biscuits, working from her favorite chair. Looking at that chair now, he can almost see her there, as if she never passed into the sweet hereafter.

To be in the Museum of Appalachia is to find oneself in the company of ghosts. To recognize not everything need fall away. To feel comfort in your heart that a story can be told, a life held, in something as simple as a ladder-back chair. So long as you make room for it.