The Bill Monroe Museum is a project of the Monroe Brothers Foundation to show the life of Bill Monroe and the early foundations of bluegrass music. The museum is in the house in Rosine, Kentucky, where Monroe grew up.
After Bill Monroe's death in 1996, bluegrass fan Dr. Campbell Mercer formed the foundation, dedicated to promoting and preserving the music, life and legacy of Bill Monroe and his brothers Birch and Charlie. Few forms of music can be traced to such a clear beginning as bluegrass, and so Mercer and the foundation planned to buy the 376-hectare (930-acre) Monroe family farm, known as Jerusalem Ridge, and build a museum and amphitheater in Rosine where bluegrass music can be played during annual spring and fall festivals.
Beginning in 2001, they restored the five-room wooden home to its 1917 appearance and filled it with Monroe family heirlooms and mementos. In the same year, they began the annual Jerusalem Ridge Bluegrass Celebration and Festival. The foundation plans to restore the entire Monroe farm, including the barn, fields, and Uncle Pen's cabin. They plan also a living history tour of the path the brothers took to their Uncle Pen's home as they met to go play square dances, allowing bluegrass pilgrims to retrace those steps through the woods.
Famous quotes containing the words bill, monroe and/or museum:
“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The mention of Greece fills the mind with the most exalted sentiments and arouses in our bosoms the best feelings of which our nature is capable.”
—James Monroe (1758–1831)
“The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self-education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)