Ulster American Folk Park

This is a project started by the Mellon family, descendants of Thomas Mellon who emigrated from Ireland to Pennsylvania with his parents in 1818.  First a lawyer, then a banker, he founded the Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh and became very wealthy.

The Folk Park is an open air museum consisting of buildings taken from around the province of Ulster, some transported and rebuilt, and some recreated. The purpose is to illustrate the living and migration from Ulster to America, and the museum is staffed by costumed re-enactors and demonstrators who explain about village life, migration and life in the New World.  

 Our visit coincided with visits from several school groups of various ages, one of which was French high school-aged kids, so the re-enactors were having a field day.  Paula was plagued by sore feet and stayed behind at the hotel, and being on my own, I got waylaid by the presentations, and didn’t see the whole park.

 

  
   The park includes a Presbyterian meeting house and a Catholic mass and school hall

  
The tour includes a Belfast street with shops also staffed with re-enactors and with items for sale. There is even a ( non-funtioning) pub.

 

  
         
A period RV.   
 The tour of the park is by sequential numbers, and includes a couple of churches, various houses and cottages and occupational demonstrations.  One of the houses was undergoing re-roofing by a team of thatchers, and there was a working blacksmith, and a schoolhouse teacher overseeing a group of student visitors. 

 The sequential tour takes you to dockside at Belfast, and aboard a small ship equipped with racks of bunks for emigrant families,

   
 and then you emerge onto a Boston, New York, or Baltimore street and proceed to a Pennsylvania farmstead, which was Mellon’s journey from Ireland to his grandfather’s farm in western Pennsylvania.

The Titanic theme figures heavily in the tour and the gift shop, as the ship left Belfast as its last port of call, and was one of the many tranport opportunities for immigration in the early twentieth century. As spartan as third class might have been aboard the ships, it was probably a higher comfort standard than many travelers had ever experienced.

  
This is an interesting and worthwhile visit, and would justify a much longer opportunity.  There is a neighboring Center for Immigration Studies to facilitate research in life and genealogy that other tour participants got to check out.  I dawdled through the presentations, however, and didn’t complete the America part of the museum tour.