Good morning!  Today I want to talk about insights into our history and the opportunity you have to enjoy relics of the past as part of your visit to Luray.  So, I choose a visit to the properties owned by the Page County Heritage Association in Hamburg, today only a small cluster of homes and buildings about two miles outside Luray.  There you’ll find the Association’s Calendine Museum set up in the house  once owned by famed sculptors William Randolph Barbee and his son Herbert, along with the Mauck “meeting house” (a place where those not members of the Episcopal Church when the Church was the Official State Church could meet with fear of problems with the local constabulary) which dates from the mid-1700s and the Hamburg Store which recreates a well-stocked “country store” circa 1940s.

In Calendine, the Association displays lots of items from Page County and its residents dating all the way back to Colonial times.  If you’ve forgotten that our early settlers actually wore some pretty bright clothing rather than just the dark black so often (wrongly) attributed to the Pilgrims, keep an eye out for the bright yellow deerskin pants from the frontier times and the hole in them where the musket ball injured the wearer in battle.  In the kitchen you’ll get a chance to examine up close one of the few surviving “Pennybacker” stoves and marvel at the good quality of ironwork being turned out by Pennybacker’s furnace right here in Luray in 1799.

The Mauch Meeting House and the Hamburg Store are directly across the street from Calendine and worth the effort to see, as well.

NOTE TO READER:  These Association’s buildings are open the 2nd Saturday of each month June through Oct, and by special request in advance of your visit, so do visit their web site for details and try to see these properties when you are here.

Keep in mind as well that the Association opens all 3 buildings during the Page County Heritage Festival, scheduled for 8 & 9 Oct 2010 at the Page County Fairgrounds in Luray, and on the 1st Sunday of December each year, when it hosts a community sing along with guest visitors singing.  Come enjoy an “old time” sing in the Mauck Meeting House and refreshments at Calendine afterward.