Ulster American Folk Park

About the Folk Park

The Ulster American Folk Park is an open-air museum at Camphill, near Omagh in County Tyrone. It tells the story of three centuries of emigration from Ulster to North America, the movement of perhaps two million people that shaped the population of the United States and Canada as much as it shaped the Ulster they left behind. The park is part of National Museums NI and was opened to the public in 1976.

The starting point, both for the museum and for the family it began as a memorial to, is the Mellon Homestead. Thomas Mellon was born here in 1813 and emigrated with his parents to western Pennsylvania at the age of five. He grew up to found the Mellon banking dynasty in Pittsburgh. The two-storey whitewashed cottage and its outbuildings stand on their original ground, the only structures on the site that were never moved.

Around the homestead, more than thirty other buildings have been gathered, mostly transplanted from sites in Ulster and Pennsylvania, dismantled stone by stone and rebuilt here. There is a Mass house, a Presbyterian meeting house, a forge, a weaver's cottage, a schoolhouse, a row of small Belfast terrace homes brought from Sandy Row. On the other side of the symbolic Atlantic crossing, the buildings change to log cabin and clapboard: a Pennsylvania farmhouse, a frontier homestead from West Virginia, a Tennessee one. The visitor walks the route the emigrants walked, in miniature.

The midpoint of the trail is the brig itself. The full-size replica of an emigrant sailing ship sits in a covered dock, with cabins below decks and an indoor street of Liverpool dockside lodgings before it and a New York wharf after it. Visitors are walked through the same sequence the emigrants were — the docks, the steerage berth, the arrival hall — with costumed interpreters along the route.

It is not a fast museum. You can walk it in two hours but it rewards three or four. The buildings are open. The fires are lit, when there are fires. The interpreters carry on doing the work the buildings were built for — spinning, baking, woodworking — and answer questions as you pass.

Essential information

Getting there

Off the A5 between Omagh and Newtownstewart, signposted. About 90 minutes from Belfast, an hour from Derry. Free car park.

Underfoot

Outdoor site with mixed surfaces — grass, gravel, cobbles, wooden floors. Sensible shoes. Most of the route is wheelchair-accessible but a few period interiors have a step.

Weather

Mostly outdoors. Bring a coat. The brig and the indoor streets give shelter when needed.

With children

One of the best museum visits in Northern Ireland for younger ones — open fires, animals, dressing-up corners and the brig itself.

Events

Major American holidays are marked — Independence Day, Thanksgiving, the Halloween Festival. Book ahead for those weekends.

Refreshments

On-site café and shop near the entrance. Picnics welcome on the grounds.