A Tyrone cottage is being taken apart stone by stone to be shipped to Virginia in the United States.
A two roomed cottage in Tyrone with no running water or electricity was lived in up until ten years ago. The cottage has been home to generations of families over the past 200 years and is now to be given a new purpose at a new location.
The house and the outbuildings are to be dismantled brick by brick and shipped to Virginia as one of the main exhibits in a museum showing the history of emigration to the new world.
Curator of the exhibition Denis McNeice describes the cottage as a house typical of the area that many emigrants lived in before leaving for America.
It is typical of the kind of houses Ulster emigrants would lived in before they went to America.
The man charged with the complicated job of dismantling the cottage is Philip Mowlatt. He has begun numbering every individual stone with a special code to enable his counterpart in Virginia to put the cottage back together in the same way the original was constructed in the 18th century. Philip Mowlatt says the house is in very good condition considering its age. When the dismantling is complete, the stones will be packed into containers and shipped to Virginia.
The idea for the museum in Virginia stemmed from the success of the Ulster American Folk Park in Omagh County Tyrone. Chairman Eric Montgomery has been involved in setting up the folk park in Virginia. He believes these projects will benefit historians on both sides of the Atlantic. The Virginia folk park will include complete farmsteads from Tyrone, Germany and England alongside an Appalachian log farmhouse.
An RTÉ News report broadcast on 27 November 1984. The reporter is David Ross.
