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Do Local Small-Town Museums Get Short Shrift?
The Garst Museum’s brand new exhibit on the cantonment from the 1790s on which present-day Greenville was built wowed me during my visit last week. Among the exhibit’s gems: one of four peace pipes believed to have been smoked at the 1795 signing of the Treaty of Greene Ville, which ended widespread hostilities between Indians and the U.S. government and opened southern Ohio to settlement.
An anonymous donor and Greenville native paid for the exhibit, which opened Sunday, April 20; museum officials declined to reveal the cost, but said it ran into the “six figures.” And it showed; the exhibit looked top-notch.
It got me thinking about the little jewels that are our local small-town museums — from the bicycle museum in New Bremen to the William Holmes McGuffey Museum, once home of the author of McGuffey’s Readers, in Oxford. Do you know of a local small-town museum (let’s define “small-town” as roughly 20,000 people or fewer) that’s too often overlooked? Tell us about what makes it special.
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By 2thebacon.blogspot.com
April 27, 2008 5:29 PM | Link to this
The Germantown Historical Society runs a nice little museum in the old Carnegie Library—itself an historical treasure. It is open May-December.