Working at Cracker Country

            By September 2016 I’d been looking for work for quite some time. I had a Master’s degree but hardly any work experience, so it was tough getting hired anywhere. (To be fair I hadn’t tried call centers yet. Fortunately.) But I actually heard back from one place I’d applied to on a whim. A museum on the Florida State Fairgrounds in Tampa named Cracker Country. I jumped at the chance to work at a museum, and thus began a two-year chapter in my life where I actually had a job I enjoyed, and learned more about historic Florida than I ever knew I would.

            Cracker Country derives its name from the cattle ranchers who inhabited Florida in the 1800’s. There are a few different theories on where the term came from. A possibly apocryphal origin is that it comes from the cracking sound of a whip, which cattle ranchers used to gather their cows from the swamps (while not actually hitting them with the whip). I’ve seen this demonstrated at Cracker Country, those whips can get quite loud. An older interpretation of the term is simply referring to poor white people, and in Shakespeare’s era it meant a boisterous person. People off-put by the term “cracker” would do well to know that it didn’t start to take on its modern racial connotation until sometime in the 1940’s.   

                The story of how Cracker Country began, as I understand it, is that in the late 1970’s the Carlton family, a very old cattle ranching family in Florida, decided they wanted to make their old family home, built in the 1880’s, into a permanent attraction at the fair. So, they had it taken apart and relocated to the State Fairgrounds. They then began acquiring other old buildings from around Florida; a two-room “shotgun shack” home, a schoolhouse, a train station, an inn, a church, a train caboose, and others. Soon they had a replica of a little town from the late 1800’s.

Cracker Country really treats its employees like family, and I don’t just say that out of some sort of brand loyalty. A couple weeks after I began working there, I married my wife Deborah (this had been scheduled months before I began working there). They happily gave me a week off, even though I had just started working there. I don’t know if any other workplace would do that. They even sent us a card and had everyone sign it, when I hardly knew anyone. They were supportive when my son was born too. One of my coworkers even gifted us an old-fashioned quilt. This is stuff that would never happen if you worked at Wal-Mart or Target or something. I felt proud and happy working there. I was helping educate children, not just increasing the profits of a greedy CEO. It was a job I felt ethical about doing, and I never felt like I was being exploited. Granted, there weren’t a lot of hours, and no health insurance. But it’s a small operation.

            My job at Cracker Country was mainly to be a tour guide to classes of children that came to the museum on field trips for most of the year. We were to dress in period-appropriate clothing and hide our technology. Even had to buy a pocket watch. It was up to you how in-character you wanted to be. The kids would rarely put up with it long if you tried to pretend you were from the 1890’s (they’re all too smart for that), unless you were a really good actor and could get them to play along with you. While some of my coworkers were that good, I couldn’t really keep it up the whole time. During the State Fair in February I would instead be stationed at different places rather than being a tour guide. I’ll go ahead and walk you through what a typical school tour was like. Everyone did the tour in a different order of course.

            Introductions

            We’d line up at the entrance to the State Fairgrounds and wait for the school buses to arrive. There’d be days where the bus couldn’t make it for whatever reason, or days where they arrived super late and significant parts of the tour had to be cut (this was most of the time actually). Tour guides would explain the rules, set the tone for the whole thing, explain what they were about to see in Cracker Country. I’d try to get them to realize how long ago the 1890’s were, and discuss the various technologies that hadn’t been invented yet. You try to get a feel for the group at this point. Not just for the kids, but the teacher and any parents who’ve tagged along.

            Laundry

            We’d walk the class over to an area with an old washboard and a tub of water and explain to them how laundry worked in the good old days before indoor plumbing and washing machines. The children will react in amazement and disgust when I explained that typical rural poor Floridians only had a couple sets of clothes back then (the days before cheap mass-produced sweatshop clothing), and took weekly baths on Saturday nights, during which the whole family had to take turns using the same bath water (“Eww!” the kids say.). The father took their bath first, the baby took their bath last. Because babies aren’t potty trained and might soil themselves in the water. (“Ewww!”) We’d also explain how lye soap was made from animal fat (“Ewwww!”) For extra gross-out comedy, I’d tell them about how cloth diapers had to be cleaned. This was the station where I had to talk the longest. You come up with ways to keep them entertained.

            Rope Making

            Next we’d take the children to a rope-making machine and have the whole class take turns cranking an old rope weaving device to make a ten-foot rope. I didn’t do the lecture here, there was someone stationed at the rope maker. But it was my job to hold the machine down and make sure it didn’t tip over as it was cranked.

            Candle Making

            This is one of my favorites. If something happened and a class cancelled and I didn’t have a group, I’d often be stationed at the candle shack. Here Cracker Country has three vats of beeswax and let the kids dip some premade candles into the wax (via a wooden stick with a clothespin at the end), and explain to them the ins and outs of beekeeping. If you had a class clown in the group this is where you’ll really want to watch them and make sure they don’t try any dangerous stunts with scalding hot wax. The worst that would usually happen though is the kids dipping the entire stick into the wax, leaving the clothespin coated in wax and potentially breaking it when you had to scrape the wax off. Ah, fun times.

            The Schoolhouse

            Depending on the schedule, we’d then take the group to either the schoolhouse or the old church (which was also a schoolhouse at one time), and do the same activity regardless of which one we went to. We explained to them how school used to work in the 1890’s, when there were no school buses, you had 1^st-8^th grades all in one room, and teachers were almost invariably unmarried women in their teens and twenties. In the actual schoolhouse they’d get to sit in old wooden desks with inkwells. The kids are given little chalkboards and do some kind of writing exercise with chalk (look around the room and write one thing you have in your classroom that you don’t see here, something like that), explaining to them that paper wasn’t used as a cost-saving measure.  The culture shock that the kids get here as well as on other parts of the tour is interesting to observe. So many kids grow up these days never knowing there was a time before the internet, let alone before television, indoor plumbing and widespread electricity. I don’t blame the kids themselves for this. Nobody’s ever told some of them about history. I like to think when I was a kid in the 1990’s I was at least aware that there was a time before cable TV and the Sega Genesis.

            Recess

            At this point of the tour the kids are going to need some time to rest their brains and do something fun, so they get about ten minutes to play with some old-fashioned toys. They’ll have jump ropes, those cups with the ball on a string, jumping jacks, and an assortment of other wooden toys (“What, no fidget spinners?” I heard a kid ask once). This is where you really have to watch out if you have a rowdy group. And stop them if they decide to play tug-of-war. This is never fun when you get one of those classes where the teacher thinks because it’s a field trip it’s their day off, and expect you to be fully in charge of their class. That’ll happen every now and then.

            The Store

            The museum still has to turn a profit to exist. So there’s a gift shop, built in an old historic general store. Here they have candy, some of the old toys the kids will have just played with, things like bonnets and quilts, other odds and ends. You can also get really good pumpkin butter. I still have a little stockpile of that. If the class finishes shopping too soon you can take them to another store on the grounds which is more of a replica of a historic dry goods store and not where you can actually make purchases. Here you can explain to them about how people used to be self-sufficient, growing their own crops and bartering at the store. The gift shop is a bit too modern for my tastes and kind of breaks the illusion, but I get why it has to exist.

            The Blacksmith

            This station was only open part of the year so we didn’t always get to take the kids here. One of the blacksmiths would give the kids a little tutorial on how blacksmithing works, and will heat up an iron rod, twist it in a vice, and dip it in water as they watch. The classes that don’t get to go here get annoyed, sadly. But the tours ended at 12:30, what are you going to do?

            The Carlton House and the Smith House

            Depending on your schedule you’ll go to one historic house or another. The Carlton house was the first building brought to Cracker Country, a two-story home. We’ll walk them through the building, past the living room and the parent’s bedroom into the kitchen, discussing how buildings in Florida had to be built back then to keep everything ventilated in the humid tropical heat. The Smith house is considerably smaller, a two-room shotgun shack (so called because with the front and back doors open you could shoot a shotgun through the home and not hit anything, so I’ve been told), which I get to explain to the kids was built at the cost of $15 by the neighbors of the Smith family as a wedding gift, to their usual amazement. There’s something that would never happen today. It is surrounded by sand, which was to protect against fires, and the children take turns raking leaves in the sand with a rake made of sticks tied together. After the brief tour they get to listen to a small lecture on butter churning, and get to churn some butter. They then get to have a sampling of butter on a saltine cracker, while I explain that’s not why this place is called Cracker Country.

            The Train Station

Me as a train conductor.

            Every tour starts and ends somewhere different on this list, but if you start at the laundry station you end at the train station. Here we walk them through the waiting room and into an office, where they are shown an old telegraph, telephone and a typewriter, and we explain how trains worked back then. This is one of my favorite places to be stationed during the fair too. The main boarding platform has a big model train set they can marvel at, with little reproductions of some of the buildings at Cracker Country. The train station was transferred over from Okahumpka, Florida. Next to the station is a wooden caboose from 1917, which is usually only open during the fair.

            The Print Station and Post Office

            Like the Blacksmith shop these are only open part of the year. The print shop has a couple old printers where during the fair an expert will run off some newspapers made with the old linotype letters. Students and visitors get to use a smaller printer to make themselves a post card. Then they go to the tiny post office to get them stamped. It used to be an actual functioning post office too until about 2012.

That about covers it. Cracker Country is only open to the public a select few times of the year. The State Fair, Museum Day in September, and they do events around Christmas, occasionally a Halloween-themed night tour as well. Also, a couple times a year they do Home School Day for home-schooled kids.

It was a (mostly) stress-free job, working at Cracker Country. I regrettably had to quit when my wife became pregnant and we needed health insurance, and get a job at a terrible call center, which is another blog post for another time. I still volunteered when I could at Cracker Country (that’s how much I liked it there), until we moved to the other side of Florida last August. I was sad to not make it to the Florida State Fair this year, but, that’s parenthood I suppose. I’ll be back eventually. My son’s not going to be one of those kids who can’t believe there was a time before the internet. The 1890’s were a much simpler time to be alive. I’d rather grow my own food and barter with my neighbors or the general store than work some soulless corporate desk job and be treated like an expendable cog. Landlords, home owners associations and Monsanto have ensured that the working class can’t grow their own food and must rely on the corporations to supply their heavily processed, pesticide-caked junk food to us, giving us tooth decay and diabetes. Everything’s about money now. It wasn’t true to the same extent back then. If I could, maybe I would trade technology and medical advancements to go back in time to the 1800’s. Like Doc Brown from Back to the Future or something. I would just have to let go of all my possessions; my VHS collection, my video games, my goth music. It’d be like becoming a Buddhist monk. I think at the end of the day I’d still be happier. I might end up dying of polio but at least I’d be happy.