This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is our American stories, and we tell all kinds of stories here on our show, as you well know.

Up next, a story from Andrea Luden,

from the Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. That's right, the Salt and Pepper

Shaker Museum. At this museum, they have 20,000 salt and pepper shaker sets and 1,500 pepper mills. Here's Andrea on how something like this

ever got started. The Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum started because my mother, who was an

archaeologist for most of her life, was basically getting bored.

We had moved to the U.S. back in the 80s, and so she was no longer affiliated with any universities in the States,

so she didn't have any projects or programs to work with.

So she started looking for pepper mills because one broke at home and she wanted another pepper mill.

And so we were searching for pepper mills and we would get another one and it would eventually break.

And as she was searching for pepper mills, she started running into salt and pepper shakers.

And as she ran into more and more salt and pepper shakers, she started to realize that you can trace our society changing over time.

So what was popular in the 20s, changes by the 40s, the 70s, all the way until now.

And that really got her passion going because she just wanted an object that's so simple that we all take for granted, but yet every single

household in the whole planet has is also a snapshot of our history.

And that's what's so fascinating.

It's not a car part.

It's not photographs.

It's something that's functional and the creativity behind them and the ingenuity in a lot of them is just amazing.

So that's how the collection started.

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