December 17 1974
NORTHERN Ireland’s contribution to the development of the United States of America is the basis of a unique educational project under way in the Co Tyrone countryside.
For the past year 35 workmen have been preparing the way for a Folk Park on a 23-acre site at Camphill, on the Omagh-Newtownstewart Road. The £300,000 project, organised by Enterprise Ulster, will bring the colourful buildings and trappings of frontier America to Co Tyrone.
Work on the project began last year and is expected to be completed by early 1976, in time to become Northern Ireland’s contribution to the commemoration in that year of the 200th anniversary of the birth of the USA.
Scenes straight from the pages of history will meet the visitor to the completed Folk Park which, among other things, will have an Old World section to show life in the country the thousands of Irish emigrants left, and a New World section to show life as they found it in America.
It is based on the very detailed description given in the autobiography of the founder of one of America’s great industrial empires, who was born in a tiny thatched cottage on the Camphill site. He was Thomas Mellon, who left Tyrone in 1818 at the age of five. His restored home was opened to the public in 1968 and subsequently it was decided to put additional land at Camphill to form a Folk Park, which through the re-construction of period buildings from both sides of the Atlantic, would tell the story of emigration to America and its effects on the new land.
In addition to the restored cottage, the Old World section will have replicas of the thatched Cross Roads Meeting House, Mountjoy, where Thomas Mellon worshipped as a boy, the local national school at Castletown, a country shop of the period, and a forge.
In the New World section the early log cabin will be reproduced as will a two-storey square log building and barn. It is also intended to reproduce a camp meeting site typical of that used by the settlers for open air worship on Sundays.
Subsequently opened in 1976, the Ulster American Folk Park tells the story of people from Ulster’s emigration to North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
