CONTRIBUTED

Visitors from Europe or just down the road are welcome at the fourth annual Clenny Creek Day with music, food, prizes, history and just plain fun on tap Saturday, April 18.

The event is 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on the site of the Bryant House and McLendon Cabin in upper Moore County at Harris Crossroads, about a 30-minute drive from the Southern Pines area.

Admission is free.

The cabin was built in 1760 by one of Moore County's earliest settlers, Joel McLendon, across the road from McLendon Creek, for which "Clenny Creek" day is named. The cabin is the oldest house in Moore County on its original site, according to Joyce Dunlap Wilson, chairwoman of Friends of the Bryant House, that carries on the Clenny Creek Day event. The approximately four-acre site is shared with the Bryant House, a manor home built about 1820 whose owner later acquired the McLendon Cabin.

Both restored houses are now museums, owned by the Moore County Historical Association, that uses money raised by the Clennie Creek Day events to restore and maintain the buildings.

"I tell schoolchildren the McLendon Cabin was built before our first president," says Wilson, chairwoman of the Friends of the Bryant House Committee that organizes and carries out Clenny Creek Day. "We get good attendance from people from other parts of the state and out of state, even from other countries. We appreciate the fact that so many people are still interested in the heritage and history of the area."

For lunch, there's Southern country-style food such as pinto beans and corn muffins accompanied by hot dogs, barbecue sandwiches, with all the trimmings, and of course non-alcoholic beverages.

Visitors can wander around in the fresh spring weather, listen to authentic bluegrass music from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. by Clyde Maness, Jerry Garner, Teddy White, and Eddie Ingram. The second group, the Hoe Cakes, will play from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. on the front porch.

There will be other fun events, including antique equipment on display. No one can leave Clenny Creek Day without learning more about the area's rich pre-Revolutionary War colonial era through volunteers wearing costumes and demonstrating the use of household tools and the way people lived in those days, as well as Civil War and 19th century rural way of life.

Volunteers include Debbie Williams, who will demonstrate colonial cooking practices with authentic pioneer type food in the McLendon Cabin with her granddaughter. Men who belong to volunteer military units, such as Marshall Caddell of the Scotch Riflemen and Sons of the Confederate Veterans, will be dressed as Confederate soldiers. Or, like Randy Brooks, who depicts an American Revolutionary, soldier and participates in the House in the Horseshoe reenactments, some may be present in costumes. The soldiers generate a lot of public interest, said Caddell, with questions about campfire life, horses, and cannon.

Vendors will also offer items for sale, often made by them and appropriate to the rural and historic ambiance.

Dressed as a colonial housewife, Lina Brooks, Randy Brooks' wife, will set up a "fly" or a canvas tent similar to that used in colonial days to shield people from outdoor weather, where she will display jewelry typical of the colonial period, into the early 1800s, also cornhusk and fabric dolls like girls of that era played with. She'll have American Indian jewelry and beads, decorated straw hats similar to those worn by colonial-era girls. Her husband makes and will have on sale sturdy haversacks (a man's travel bag used in the 1700s), and handmade 18th century style clay pipes, she said.

Other vendors include Maureen Sutton, who will offer heirloom flower seedlings, perennials, herbs, "worm tea" (a fertilizer in water solution), heirloom tomato, pepper, cucumber, eggplant seedlings, Jerusalem artichoke starts; Mandy Davis, for the Griffin Family Farm, offering fresh vegetables, possibly eggs; Carol Richardson with handpainted gourds; Terry Palmiter with horseshoe art, and a host of others.

Sandhills Area Land Trust has acquired 222 acres to protect "forever" as a wildlife preserve at McLendon Creek, a tributary of Deep River. SALT will have a table with information, and the Rufus Barringer Civil War Round Table will be represented as well.

The raffle tickets are $1 each and a generous, varied selection of donated items may be viewed at the MCHA Web site at moorehistory.com.

Gulistan Carpets of Aberdeen, along with other local craftspeople and artists, have donated more than $1,000 worth of items. Raffle tickets are $1 each, with the drawing at the event. Raffle prizes include a religious themed "tile" that can be hung on a wall, a $100 savings bond, pottery, a baby quilt donated by Rita Joyner, plants donated by Aurora Hills Farm and Nursery and Poverty Hills Nursery; a stoneware clay turtle donated by Tara Dowd; a handmade wood wall sign donated by Medleyanna's, and handmade quilts made by Anna Belle Campbell.

To visit Clenny Creek Day take U.S. 15-501 north from the Pinehurst Traffic Circle, turn west on N.C. 73, go to the intersection of Beulah Hill Church Road and take a right. Go straight through two crossroads, the second being Harris Crossroads. The houses are located down a hill on the right at a state highway marker. For more information, call (910) 692-2051.