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Historic Crab Orchard Museum and Pioneer Park

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1982 established. 3663 Crab Orchard Rd.

This museum and pioneer park relate the history and prehistory of Tazewell County and Southwest Virginia and comprise an exhibit building and structures moved here from around the region. The complex is situated below the hilltop site of the eighteenth-century Witten's Fort, or Big Crab Orchard Fort, whose blockhouse is reproduced at the museum entrance. The blockhouse is an early reproduction, dating c. 1935. Other buildings include the board-and-batten structure for exhibitions, several log residences, a loom house, apple house, blacksmith's shop, cobbler and carpenter's shop, and outbuildings.

On the other side of U.S. 460, more modern and popular culture thrives in a weekend flea market next to the Farmer's Livestock Market with its wooden pens protected by an open shelter of metal. Downhill, a roughly circular race track surrounded by wooden bleachers was home to three classes of lawn-mower races: stock, modified, and super modified.

Writing Credits

Author: 
Anne Carter Lee
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Data

What's Nearby

U.S. Post Office
Tazewell County Courthouse
Masonic Building
R. R. Henry House
Stras Memorial Episcopal Church

Citation

Anne Carter Lee, "Historic Crab Orchard Museum and Pioneer Park", [Tazewell, Virginia], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/VA-02-TZ13.

Print Source

Cover: Buildings of Virginia vol 2

Buildings of Virginia: Valley, Piedmont, Southside, and Southwest, Anne Carter Lee and contributors. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015, 488-488.

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