October 10, 2019

The Not Unique MFH

By roads-rus

I had a funny encounter yesterday.   Shopping in a grocery store, I spoke to avid traveler Ernie who told me he had read my blog about Tallahassee and wanted to assure me that he had no plans to go there.  Ruth later took him a treat, a Victorian candy sample from our favorite Tallahassee attraction Lofty Pursuits.  It’s true that Tallahassee wasn’t my all-time favorite destination, but I don’t want to keep others from going there.  I just want to be as truthful as I can about my experience.  In addition to the candy-making, Ruth and I enjoyed the old capitol building.  However, we did not like the locally praised and near-the-capitol Museum of Florida History.

The Museum of Florida History (MFH) is one of those institutions that overwhelms the visitor.  It’sTALLassee Here commends it for having 45,700 artifacts.  It seemed to me that all of them have been on display since it opened in 1977 in its 11 mostly huge rooms.  Any museum that begins with a giant armadillo and a mastodon skeleton, has an area called Grandma’s Attic, and presents a historic general store exhibit is going to be too much for me.  It’s one of those attractions where I look for memorable objects to study but forget about the place as soon as I leave the final exhibit area, in this case the Changing Exhibit Gallery.  The 1st gallery was called “Florida’s First People” and contained the diorama that is up top.  It’s prominently featured in MFH’s chief brochure along with the Knott House Museum.  The Knott family’s 1840s home next door to MFH is where the Emancipation Proclamation was announced in Florida, and we were encouraged to visit it and “step back in time”.  At least admission is free for both.  If you like this kind of attraction, you’ll love MFH.

After I saw a re-created steamboat and some very old autos, a citrus packing warehouse, and had a complete review of Florida history, I paused to recall what I had learned that I didn’t already know before I entered.  Seminole is a mixture of various tribes, and after 3 bloody wars most of them were dead.  I already knew that the part of the state below The Panhandle was undeveloped after the Civil War but I did not know that steamboats thrived on Florida’s northern rivers.  I didn’t know that when tourism developed in the 20th century, autos brought out-of-staters who were labeled “tin can tourists” by locals.  Ruth bought a glass hummingbird in the gift show for our daughter.  She really likes it.

I yawned a lot during the film about Florida history that included footage of the Weeki Wachee “famous live mermaid show”.

Hank

About roads-rus

Since the beginning, I've had to avoid writing about the downside of travel in order to sell more than 100 articles. Just because something negative happened doesn't mean your trip was ruined. But tell that to publishers who are into 5-star cruise and tropical beach fantasies. I want to tell what happened on my way to the beach, and it may not have been all that pleasant. My number one rule of the road is...today's disaster is tomorrow's great story. My travel experiences have appeared in about twenty magazines and newspapers. I've been in all 50 states more than once and more than 50 countries. Ruth and I love to travel internationally--Japan, Canada, China, Argentina, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, etc. Within the next 2 years we will have visited all of the European countries. But our favorite destination is Australia. Ruth and I have been there 9 times. I've written a book about Australia's Outback, ALONE NEAR ALICE, which is available through both Amazon & Barnes & Noble. My first fictional work, MOVING FORWARD, GETTING NOWHERE, has recently been posted on Amazon. It's a contemporary, hopefully funny re-telling of The Odyssey. View all posts by roads-rus
This entry was posted on Thursday, October 10th, 2019 at 8:31 pm and posted in Florida. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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