Past Programs

Organ building in the Hall of Musical Instruments, National Museum of History and Technology. Making a pipe organ involves a striking variety of skills. A feeling of community inevitably develops among organ shop workers because each depends upon the work of the others, and each knows that no two completed instruments will ever be exactly alike. In some instances the signatures of all who worked on an instrument will be found inside the organ, indicating the involvement of each person from start to finish. Pipe-making and the voicing of pipes are perhaps the most fascinating aspects of organ building. During the 1978 Festival, organ builders offered daily demonstrations of these processes, from the hammering of the planed metal through the forming and voicing of the pipes themselves.

Sharecroppers in the exhibit, Everyday Life in the American Past, National Museum of History and Technology. The majority of nineteenth and early twentieth century Southern farmers were landless. Sharecroppers, tenants and wage hands, all had an important place in American history. At the exhibit of a sharecroppers' home, black former sharecroppers conducted workshops to explore such questions as what were the daily activities of men and women on farms? What did the children do? How were the rooms furnished? What did they cook with? What did they eat? What crops did they raise, and how did they divide them with the landowner? Demonstrations of butter churning complemented the narrative workshops. The experiences discussed offered evidence of the "hard times" black sharecroppers lived through, and of the reasons that thousands left the country and moved to the cities in one of the great migrations of American history. The effects of this Great Migration still shaped people's lives decades later.