The Rural Homestead

rural homestead

 

To visit the Rural Homestead is to experience the lifestyle of rural Southerners. Native materials, hand-hewn cypress shingles and ancient timbers present a faithful recreation of what “home” meant to the plain folk of the Nineteenth century South.

 

Throughout the Pilgrimage, local volunteers demonstrate the homely skills they learned first-hand growing up in rural West Feliciana: open hearth and wood stove cookery, basket weaving, quilting, cotton carding and spinning. The grist mill grinds out cornmeal, shingles are rived, ground is broken by mule and plow, all to the sound of home-grown musicmakers – a happy “frolic” from an earlier day.