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The Southampton Agriculture & Forestry Museum Committee made the decision Thursday, Aug. 8, to cancel Down Home Day for 2024 due to scheduling conflicts that had led to a lack of workers.

Down Home Day has been a staple of the museum’s annual event calendar at the Southampton Heritage Village for around 25 years. Always a spring event, it had been scheduled to take place in the fall for the first time this year, set for Saturday, Oct. 12.

Lynda T. Updike is president of the museum and village’s umbrella organization, the Southampton County Historical Society, and she noted that the purpose of Down Home Day is “to showcase old crafts that our ancestors practiced in their day, like running the sawmill, running the grist mill, making apple butter, cooking cracklins, making soap — all the old crafts.”

Updike said the event received its name from Helen Howell, who was quite active for years at the museum, along with her husband William Howell.

Down Home Day has been canceled before, Updike said, but only due to major weather events, including Hurricane Floyd and Hurricane Isabel, and the major health event that was the COVID-19 global pandemic.

WHY DOWN HOME DAY WAS CANCELED

This year, different scheduling issues combined to create a major shortage of volunteers needed to staff the event on Oct. 12. 

“There’s a wedding that weekend that involves some of our people, and the others were getting ready for Nostalgic Christmas,” she said, referring to the next major event on the museum’s calendar. “They would already be unpacking stuff. Anne Bryant was going to be at a woman’s club conference, and I don’t know, the list just went on and on. The (model) train people were going to be somewhere else; we didn’t have enough people to run the trains.”

Updike said she kept trying to think of ways that Down Home Day could still move forward on a different date this fall. 

“But if we moved it up, there was a conflict with the Franklin Fall Festival, and if we moved it back, there was another conflict,” she said. “I hated that we had to do it, but we really didn’t have any alternative.”

She said, “Rather than have it with not enough help, we decided to cancel it.”

THE IMPACT ON THE MUSEUM

While Updike noted that funds raised by Down Home Day have helped with maintenance and other expenses at the village, she made clear that the cancellation of the event would not be a significant financial blow to the museum.

“We sell meal, we grind corn and make meal, and we sell the meal, and we have admissions (at Down Home Day), but it’s not a major moneymaker,” she said.

WHEN DOWN HOME DAY WILL RETURN

She noted that it is her hope that Down Home Day will return in the fall of 2025. It has swapped places on the museum’s annual event calendar with Heritage Day, which had previously been held in the fall but will now continue to be held in the spring.