Gnadenhutten Pioneer Days to feature reenactors, new museum changes
Trudy Lewis, a volunteer with the Gnadenhutten Historical Society, at the newly rearranged front room of the museum. The museum is being reorganized to better reflect the history.
The chance to talk with reenactors at their camps and learn more about how people lived in colonial times will be featured at the Gnadenhutten Pioneer Days Festival Aug. 3-4. The reenactors will demonstrate how people lived day to day at their camps.
“They’re going to begin coming in on Thursday. The festival is going to be Saturday and Sunday,” said Andy McMillen, president of the Gnadenhutten Historical Society. Vendors also will be onsite for the weekend.
Visitors are invited to bring their lawn chairs and hear a history lecture by McMillen, who has been researching a few of the more prominent murders that occurred in Tuscarawas County in the 19th century. The lecture will begin at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 3.
The crock auction will be held Sunday, Aug. 4 at 2 p.m. The crocks this year have been created by Peace Flower Pottery, which made the crocks last year too.
“They’re going to be unique. They will be half glazed; the top part will be glazed. It’s going to have the outline of Tuscarawas County with a cross at the location of Gnadenhutten,” McMillen said. “They have a rustic look to them.”
Some details have yet to be determined. For updated information on the festival, visit the Facebook page at Gnadenhutten Museum & Historical Site.
In the past year, much time has been spent by the volunteers of the GHS to reorganize the museum.
“We’ve got a very good committee put together to focus on education,” McMillen said. “We want to do a better job with the education piece in terms of explaining what we have. There are some very neat things in that museum, but a lot of things not very well explained.”
The volunteers are working with a member of the Ohio Archaeological Society to learn more about what is in the museum.
“We want to identify what exactly we have there, and we want to catalog what we have,” McMillen said. “He was very surprised at how many really old pieces there were. There are quite a few pieces that are 10,000-12,000 years old.”
The volunteers want that information to be as accessible as possible and are considering placing QR codes near some items that visitors could scan and a video or more information about the piece would come up.
The building itself is historical, having been built in the 1930s. It was a Works Progress Administration project, which was created by U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Another reason for getting the museum and grounds in good condition is a new historical Ken Burns documentary coming out in 2025. Burns’ crew was in the area last year and filmed at Gnadenhutten. If the Gnadenhutten story is told in the documentary, McMillen thinks there could be an uptick in interest in the site.
“He and his crew are masterful at telling side stories,” McMillen said, adding the massacre is not the only focus of the history of Gnadenhutten. “The Moravian mission system throughout the Tuscarawas Valley, in and of itself, there’s no better example of successful missions in the Western Hemisphere. Those years were booming.”
McMillen wonders what the future could have held for the Moravian missions had the war not occurred.
July hours at the museum are Wednesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 1-5 p.m.
The hours of the museum will change in August because some of their volunteers are teachers and will go back to school.
August hours are Wednesday through Friday and Sunday from 1-5 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
In September and October, the museum site will be open on weekends only. The hours will be Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 1-5 p.m.