June 20 - Ulster American Folk Park

I was really looking forward to today, and the Folk Park turned out to be even better than I expected. I have Scottish ancestors who were brought to Northern Ireland in the 1600s to tip the balance in favor of Protestantism, and emigrated from there to Pennsylvania. This folk park was all about those people and later emigrants. It started with cottages brought in from various areas in Northern Ireland.

The middle of the walking tour was like a seaport area where you walked thru a ship and out the other side in America. One of the shops on the Irish side of the seaport was a general store - we thought it was cool that the tea, sugar, flour, etc. was packaged in different colors so that the shoppers (mostly illiterate) could tell what they were buying.

Then the last part of the walk had cabins and houses of Scot-Irish settlers brought over from Penn, Virginia and Tennessee and reconstructed there. It was all very well-done and very interesting - spent about 6 hours there altogether!.