North Country Folklore Online

TAUNY’s second website--www.northcountryfolklore.org--is dedicated to educational resource materials for school age and adult learners and teachers about the folk culture and traditional arts of our region. While we plan to expand the site eventually to include music, art, and more, it currently is the home of four modules: Tales of the River: Collected Stories from St. Lawrence River Communities; Good Food Served Right: Food Traditions in New York’s North Country; Meet the Masters, a virtual exhibit of text, photographs, audio and video clips about 26 recipients of our North Country Heritage Awards; and Register of Very Special Places, TAUNY’s documentation of selected cultural landmarks in our region.

The first is a collection of the texts of stories--reminiscences, tall tales and legends--recorded over a five- year period from men and women from Cape Vincent to Akwesasne, that illustrate everyday life along the shores of one of the great rivers of the world. Texts of stories of fishing and hunting, battling storms and ice, bootlegging and local characters are enhanced by photographs, audio recordings, and a short interpretive essay. The second is a collection of photographs, quotations, and short audio documentaries about a wide variety of food customs--gardening, farmstands, public suppers, social celebrations, for instance--that explain a great deal about regional specialties and ethnic diversity in the North Country. The Meet the Masters module includes photographs and recordings excerpted from our gallery exhibit and the RVSP module describes the first cultural landmarks included in TAUNY’s registry as well as the process for documenting very special places. If you are not able to visit our gallery, please take advantage of this online resource.

Meet the Masters

Meet the Masters at TAUNY is a virtual exhibit of photographs, short biographies, audio versions of stories and songs, and some video clips about the recipients of TAUNY’s North Country Heritage Award since 1993. It was first produced for an iMac unit with an auxiliary video monitor for our own Wall of Fame gallery, where individuals or small groups can do a self-conducted tour. Click here to see the complete exhibit online, courtesy of North Country Public Radio.

Local Learning/North Country

TAUNY's ongoing initiative to work with local teachers and school districts to identify and create ways for them to utilize local heritage resources, especially TAUNY's programs and archival materials, for curriculum planning and learning activities. TAUNY has organized K-12 teacher workshops, met with middle and high school departments to orient them to using local materials that meet learning standards for their classes, and assisted individual teachers with planning oral history or folklore units or projects for students. In particular, TAUNY's education website North Country Folklore Online is a major resource that's readily available for both teachers and students to use. TAUNY folklorists can conduct in-service workshops that utilize their methods or materials or assist teachers to plan and implement appropriate classes or courses.