Griffith’s character frequently found folksy and entertaining ways to teach lessons, big and small, to the characters on the show and to those of us who were watching. So it was that America’s favorite dad ignited a love of history in Opie and his friends on the 1963 episode of the “Andy Griffith Show” called “Andy Discovers America.” It was also the episode in which Sheriff Andy meets schoolteacher Helen Crump, the woman he would eventually marry. … Git your gun we gonna have us a Revolution!” “Well, so your great, great, great, great, great, great, great-granddaddies all got together, you know, to think about it and they argued back and forth about it for a while and finally one of ’em says, ‘Let’s do it! Let’s start our own country. “Yeah, and he says, ‘You better think about that thing’,” Taylor continued. “Of all the nerve,” exclaimed an indignant Deputy Barney Fife. “But the king over there in England, he says, ‘If you do that I’m gonna send my Red Coats.’ They was British soldiers and he was a gonna send ’em over here to whoop us!”

Fact, we was thinking about breakin’ away and startin’ our own country,” Sheriff Andy Taylor explained to a group of spellbound boys at the courthouse.

“One time, a long time ago, this country was a part of England and we wasn’t gettin’ along with them too good. Our History is a regular column submitted by Kate Rauhauser-Smith, visitor services manager at the Mount Airy Museum of Regional History, examining the region’s history and some related displays at the museum.

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