ABSTRACT
Association for Living History, Farm and Agricultural Museums was few years old when Roger L. Welsch spoke at the 1974 annual meeting on the living history museum as a repository of historical concepts and processes, whether those processes dealt with housebuilding, medicine, agriculture or foodways. Fifty years later, his thoughts on the role of living history museums in documenting and preserving the technologies and processes of the past are as relevant now as they were then. Two common and contradictory popular concepts plague folklore and folklife museums: that the good old days were only well-mowed Elysian fields, and that pioneer life was one constant agonized struggle for survival. The living history museum can serve and should serve the double function of clarifying the true condition of a historical-geographic environment and serving as a repository for those concepts and processes that might well yet serve man but which have been lost or neglected in the wash of the technological tidal wave.
