Governor's School

The Exchange Place

The Exchange Place Living History Farm offers a unique opportunity to experience early Appalachian life through an immersive, place-based setting. Located in Kingsport, Tennessee, the site preserves a working 19th-century farmstead that interprets the daily lives, labor, and traditions of the region’s early settlers.

Rather than presenting history as something distant or static, Exchange Place emphasizes lived experience. The farm includes historic structures, heritage livestock, and cultivated fields, all maintained using traditional methods. Demonstrations of blacksmithing, hearth cooking, farming practices, and domestic crafts provide insight into the skills and systems that sustained rural communities in the 1800s.

The site also highlights the cultural intersections that shaped Appalachian life, including the blending of European traditions with Indigenous knowledge and the realities of frontier settlement. Through this lens, students are able to examine how environment, resource use, and community networks influenced both survival and cultural development in the region.

As part of the Governor’s School program, a visit to Exchange Place allows students to engage directly with historical practices and material culture. It reinforces classroom learning by situating historical concepts within a physical landscape, encouraging students to consider how people adapted to their environment and how those adaptations contributed to the broader story of Tennessee’s history and cultural identity.