Life of Sarah Doak to be explored in presentations July 23 and 29 at Doak House Museum
Upcoming presentations at the Doak House Museum will provide a glimpse into the daily life of a 19th century woman on the frontier of East Tennessee.
“Walk in Her Footsteps: Sarah Doak on America’s First Frontier” will be presented Friday, July 23, and Thursday, July 29, at the Doak House Museum on the Tusculum College campus. The presentations will be at 2 p.m. both days.
Historic interpreter Anna Jane Taylor will portray Sarah Doak in a first-person, period presentation. Sarah Doak was the wife of the Rev. Samuel Witherspoon Doak, co-founder of Tusculum College. The Doaks and their 13 children lived in the two-story home, built in the 1830s, that is now the Doak House Museum.
The program will focus on the life of Doak – her duties and responsibilities as matriarch of a prominent Greeneville family, the running of a large and active household, her childbearing years that spanned three decades and the changes she saw during her lifetime.
The two programs are in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution’s “Journey Stories” exhibit now on display at the Nathanael Greene Museum in downtown Greeneville through Aug. 7.
“Journey Stories” is a traveling exhibit that explores how transportation and migration helped build America and changed the country as well as what the mobile world looked to travelers along the way. The display describes, for example, how thousands of early immigrants made hazardous ocean voyages to establish a new way of life in the United States, the trips made in covered wagons by settlers heading west and the effect of railroad construction on the expansion of the country.
The Doak House Museum is one of two on campus administered by the college’s Department of Museum Program and Studies. The museum is the 19th century home of the Rev. Samuel Witherspoon Doak, co-founder of Tusculum College, and hosts thousands of school children from the region for a variety of educational programs related to the 19th century.
The Museums also administer the President Andrew Johnson Museum and Library, which houses a special collection of items relating to the 17th president, the college’s archives, special themed exhibits and volumes from the institution’s original library. The museums are also two of the 10 structures on the Tusculum campus on the National Register of Historic Places. The museum department also offers one of the few undergraduate degree programs in museum studies in the country.
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