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Plantation museum gins up old-time Christmas

Seasonal decorations bring the Christmas spirit to Plantation Agriculture Museum in Scott.
Seasonal decorations bring the Christmas spirit to Plantation Agriculture Museum in Scott.

SCOTT -- If you believe Christmas has turned much too commercial, Plantation Agriculture Museum offers an antidote this weekend by evoking the reputedly simpler Good Old Days.

Operated as a state park in Scott, the museum is staging its yearly Holiday Crafts Open House from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday.

We're talking handmade Christmas gifts of the kind farm kids received -- and were happy to get -- back when mules pulled the plows and cotton was picked by hand.

Admission to the open house is free, including cookies and hot mulled apple cider along with holiday music. There is a charge of $3 per person or $10 per family to join in making crafts that can serve as retro presents. That fee also lets designing visitors compete to construct the best graham cracker house.

Several craft items have a Southern tenor, including ornaments made from okra and angels created from cotton balls. Staff members will also show how to do handmade Christmas cards, potholders, miniature soaps, candles, toys and games.

Folks who prefer to buy their gifts already made can browse the museum's amply stocked shop, where all prices will be cut by 20 percent Saturday.

Those reductions include one of the shop's least expensive gift possibilities: a boll of locally picked cotton, which normally costs 93 cents. You'll want to remove the price tag before wrapping.

While savoring all this Yuletide nostalgia, Saturday's visitors can also swallow a dose of reality about the vaunted Good Old Days, at least as they transpired in rural Arkansas. The museum's exhibits leave little doubt about how hard farm life here was before mechanization took hold around World War II.

Most 21st-century Arkansans would be worn to a frazzle by working in the museum's mock-up of a farm kitchen from the early 20th century.

It contains a wood-burning cookstove, an icebox that required regular filling by an iceman, a pitcher pump, a wringer washing machine and other relics of the time before rural electrification. Doing the family's laundry was pretty much an all-day project.

Exhibits on the annual cotton-plantation cycle of old make clear that the picking was especially onerous. Pickers would describe their work hours as "from can to can't" -- from when they could first see the sun at dawn to when they couldn't any more at sunset.

Across from its main structure, the museum's Dortch Gin Building gives a vivid idea of the complex ginning process. A larger building, Seed Warehouse No. 5, is entered through old Cotton Belt railroad boxcars.

Complementing the museum's rustic flavor is bustling Cotham's Mercantile, a nearby restaurant housed in a ramshackle general store dating to 1917. Cotham's figures to be super-busy on Saturday, with waits to be seated stretching long enough that appetites are primed to tackle the redoubtable Hubcap Burger.

Plantation Agriculture Museum, 14 miles east of Little Rock at the junction of U.S. 165 and Arkansas 161 in Scott, is open 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and 1-5 p.m. Sunday. It is closed on Mondays as well as Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year's Day. Call (501) 961-1409 or visit arkansasstateparks.com.

Weekend on 12/18/2014

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