Museum Receives Federal Grant to Support Living History Program

We are excited to announce that the Tobacco Farm Life Museum received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: NEH Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan (#SHARP) to fund our project “Bringing History to Life: Creating a Living History Program at the Tobacco Farm Life Museum.”

The Tobacco Farm Life Museum has been selected to receive a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which will provide support for the development of a living history program at the museum. The grant will provide funding for staff, research, training, and historically accurate costumes for Living History interpreters. The program will be in development through the end of 2021 with a tentative public start date in the spring of 2022.

Melody Worthington, the museum’s executive director, reflected on the news, “We are excited to bring a new type of programming to the museum which builds on our existing Stepping into the Past Saturday Series of demonstrations to more regularly bring history to life through living history interpretation and demonstrations, and we are grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the SHARP program for this funding and opportunity to expand and bring new life to our programming.”

“The American Rescue Plan recognizes that the cultural and educational sectors are essential components of the United States economy and civic life, vital to the health and resilience of American communities,” said NEH Acting Chairman Adam Wolfson. “These new grants will provide a lifeline to the country’s colleges and universities, museums, libraries, archives, historical sites and societies, save thousands of jobs in the humanities placed at risk by the pandemic, and help bring economic recovery to cultural and educational institutions and those they serve.”

The grant awarded is supported by $135 million in supplemental funding allocated to NEH by the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. For more information about the grant program, you can view the NEH’s press release about the awards here: https://www.neh.gov/news/neh-awards-878-million-arp-relief-funding

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.