How many people south of the Border have crossed to see a wonderfully recreated part of our history? It is the Ulster-American Folk Park near Omagh, and according to Ireland of the Welcomes the largest museum of its kind in Europe. The park was built between 1972 and 1976, based around the story of Thomas Mellon, who left Derry at the age of six with his parents and settled in Pennsylvania in 1818. The family went on to prosper, found the Mellon bank and build railroads. When Thomas's great-grandson came from America to visit the family homestead in Camphill, County Tyrone, in 1964 he found, writes Ann Hailes, "it was being used as an outhouse". He pledged to renovate it in a setting which would eventually support the amazing story of Ulster families, both Catholic and Protestant, who took that treacherous voyage to a new life. "One Presbyterian clergyman was successful in rallying his entire congregation who set off en masse to set up in the colony."
You find in the Park the cottages of the landless poor: a single room with one wooden bed, which housed two adults and eight children, who lived in the Sperrin mountains in the late 1700s; the blacksmith's forge and the weaver's cottage thatched with flax grown nearby in the Park. Eighty acres in all, and in recent times the Park was named the best large museum in Ireland for the Tullyallen Mass House of 1768, Ann Hailes tells us. There is an exact, full-size replica of the colourful Pennsylvania farmhouse, a six-room dwelling, which still stands in the town of Export, Pennsylvania, where the Mellon family settled. Indeed, many striking photographs, including one of a Conestoga wagon, a tall, ungainly-looking covered vehicle, the sort of horse-drawn wagon in which many of the newly-arrived emigrants would have made their way across America. You had to be a survivor. Many, many activities go on there. Cooking, spinning and, the newest acquisition, the Samuel Fulton house. It is a settler's cabin built of limestone field rubble, two storeys high, dismantled by American historic architects and shipped in containers to Omagh. Fulton left Derry in 1717 to live on the Indian frontier, named the townlands around him Donegal Springs, Fulton and Rapho. The museum lives and grows, almost under your eyes. Bustles. See it.