The Ulster American Folk Park
One of the best museums in Ireland, the Ulster American Folk Park at Campbell Hill near Omagh combines an innovative indoor exhibition with an extensive outdoor museum to tell the story of mass emigration from Ulster to America in the 18th and 19th centuries. The indoor exhibition contains photos, newsbills and three-dimensional depictions of the hard life in Ulster, especially during the potato famine, which led people to undertake the lengthy journey across the Atlantic to seek the promised land.
The museum also stresses that many of the Ulster pioneers went to America with visions and ambition. One of those men was Thomas Mellon whose cottage the Folk Park was built around. Mellon left Tyrone in 1818 and became a banker, judge and millionaire in America. His son Andrew was secretary to the US Treasury, ambassador to London and chief architect of the steel town of Pittsburgh. The Mellon family also helped to finance the Woldorf Astoria, the Golden Gate Bridge and the locks of the Panama Canal. The childhood cottage of Irish immigrants' spokesman John Hughes has also been moved to the museum. Born in Tyrone in 1797, Hughes started out as a gardener's boy and became Archbishop of New York. Ulstermen took part in the signing of the American Declaration of Independence and three first generation American presidents were from Ulster stock.
The interior of a full sized emigrant ship gives you a real sense of the appalling conditions in which the passengers had to travel, sleep, cook, eat and die in a squalid cramped hold on their long journey to America.
Stepping out into the American side of the park literally feels like a breath of fresh air especially when the spartan pre-famine Ulster cottage and Ulster street are compared with the roomy homesteads of the early settlers. There are over 30 reconstructed and replica buildings including a Pennsylvania farmstead, a forge, churches and log cabins, and guides in period costume who tell you how the new settlers built their houses, made essential household items and cooked.
Ulster History Park
The Ulster History Park near Omagh contains fascinating full-scale models of Ulster settlements from the Stone Age to the 17th century. Tyrone has a huge concentration of stone reminders of ancient communities and if you want to put them into context the Park is a great place to come to find out how these people lived.
There are models of a 7000BC Mesolithic hunter-gatherer's hut covered with animal skins, a Bronze Age crannog on a lake island, a 12th century monastic settlement with a round tower, a Norman motte and bailey, a 17th century plantation town and an exhibition centre. You can also go on informative guided tours of the museum.
US Presidents Ancestral Homes
You can visit the ancestral homes of two famous American presidents in County Tyrone. General Ulysses S Grant's mother's 19th century farm near house Ballygawley has been restored and filled with period furniture.
The old field plan is still there along with traditional farm animals and a visitors' centre. Grant led the Yankee Union army to victory in the American Civil War and was after elected as America's 18th president. The farmer's cottage where Woodroe Wilson's father, a Strabane printer lived, is in Dergalt near Strabane.
Wilson took America into the First World War to aid the struggling Allies in 1917 but lost the election in his second term after the Senate refused to endorse his proposals for a League of Nations contained in the Treaty of Versailles.
Tyrone Crystal
Just North East of Dungannon you can watch Tyrone Crystal (cut lead glass) being made at the Tyrone Crystal factory. During the tour (£2 which is refunded if you buy anything) you see the molten glass being prepared at the furnace, hand blown, cooled, checked for flaws, bevelled, marked out, cut and polished.
The Tyrone Crystal vases, glasses, bowls etc are not as famous and sought after as Waterford Crystal, but this also makes them cheaper and you can buy seconds at 25% discount at the factory.
