The Tablertown People of Color Museum: Balancing the Oral, the Material, & the Community in an Appalachian Local History Context
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Date
2025-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
The Tablertown People of Color Museum serves to document and preserve the cultural heritage narratives of the residents of a mixed-race community whose stories offer an alternative to dominant historical accounts of Southern Ohio, greater Appalachia, and the entire nation. Building off research done for the Ohio Field School of the Ohio State University’s Center for Folklore Studies, I examine the oral history that grounds the museum’s narrative and ask the following questions: How does the museum seek to rewrite Ohio, Appalachian, and American history, and does its approach offer a useful corrective to mainstream representations of this region and its people? Further, how does the museum's emphasis on oral history and local knowledge systems correlate with other attempts to overturn the rankings of authority in historical representation and invert informational hierarchies? And despite its basis in this singularity of region and race, its assertion of a connection to national history suggests a reformational mission. With that, how does it compare to other grassroot efforts in our contemporary historical landscape?
A visitor to the museum will also encounter it as an interconnected assemblage, comprising the traditionally passed oral narratives and artifacts, formal documents that serve to support and prove the legitimacy of the oral histories, and finally the curator’s performance of the obligatory museum tour, which reconfigures the oral history with each iteration. Together, these elements constitute a single narrative I explore in order to examine how they affect and support one another in a situation of limited resources.
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Keywords
Folklore, Local history, Museum, Appalachia, Oral history