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I've been sitting on this review for a while, meaning to post and and continuing to forget. Oops!
If you don't know the story of the treasure of the steamboat Arabia, it's a pretty incredible one.
Loaded to capacity with an enormous cargo of goods, the Arabia set sail up the Missouri River in 1856; her aim was to distribute merchandise to a number of frontier-town general stores north of St. Louis. A submerged spar (broken tree stump) punctured her hull and the ship with all its cargo sank within minutes. The passengers and crew all escaped with their lives; the only casualty was a mule tied to the ship's rail whose owner neglected to free him before swimming for shore. Over time, the course of the Missouri changed so drastically that the Arabia wound up discovered in the late 1980s in a Kansas cornfield!
Archaeological crews exhumed the entire ship and her contents; the ship has been rebuilt complete with original working sidewheel, and the museum contains displays of all the lading of the Arabia. This includes medical supplies, household goods, preserved food, bourbon whiskey, hardware and tools, fabric and notions, readymade clothing, shoes and boots, luxury items such as china and jewelry, firearms, you name it! All of it has been painstakingly preserved and displayed. There's even a restoration lab open on one wall to the public--you can watch as technicians work to restore items before your very eyes using equipment like a freeze-dryer, dental tools, tiny brushes, etc.
What was so amazing to me was the quantity of recovered items--not just a few buttons, but thousands of them; not just one pair of shoes, but dozens; not a single bolt of cloth, but a whole stack of them. The opportunity to inspect multitudes of everyday objects of 1856 was indescribably excellent. I took some time out of my drive back to Carolina from Utah this summer to visit the museum--only a short jaunt off of the interstate highway--and am so glad that i did. I kept saying to my friend that accompanied me, "This is awesome. This is awesome!"
My main criticism of the museum is its crummy gift shop. They are on the right track with some of their items--they reproductions of some of the recovered artifacts, a couple perfumes, a tiny child's doll, a bell, a key, a button--but by and large the merchandise blows. I wanted a range of t-shirt and hoodie designs to choose from, a whole array of postcards, a coffeetable book with excellent photos and documentation, etc., and they don't have much of that. It's largely stocked with standard generic state-souvenir crap you can get at any truckstop. Disappointing. Where are the parasols, reticules, ascots, fun sutlery things that would sell like hotcakes? The museum is well worth the trip regardless; they ought to fire their merchandising director though, because i really wanted to spend a ton of money in their gift shop but there wasn't enough quality merchandise for me to purchase. I bought a necklace made from one of the calico buttons and a single postcard.
Graspy shoppy acquisitivity aside, i highly recommend the museum to anyone interested in American 19th century history, particularly those with an enthusiasm for the minutiae of daily life. It's decidedly worth checking out!
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And, speaking of costume related history, I've got a link from the GBACG list via La Bricoleuse reader (and pal)![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
trystbat: the Danish site Tidens Toej is an amazing resource for period garments! All the text is in Danish, but it's fairly easy to navigate anyway using intuition and online translating sites. The coolest thing about the site I think is, not only do they have excellent photos of their archived garments, but they have period research images (engravings, illustrations, etc.) *&* in some cases, downloadable PDFs of patterns for the garments! I like the format of the site so much, i'm going to forward the info to the folks that run our online historic costume archive, CoSTAR!
Also of interest, a page about shipwreck indigo. Essentially, dye professional Jenny Balfour Paul had the extraordinary opportunity to dye some cloth using indigo recovered in an archaeological exhumation of the Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, the flagship of a fleet of ships that sank off the Caribbean Turks Islands in 1641.
If you don't know the story of the treasure of the steamboat Arabia, it's a pretty incredible one.
Loaded to capacity with an enormous cargo of goods, the Arabia set sail up the Missouri River in 1856; her aim was to distribute merchandise to a number of frontier-town general stores north of St. Louis. A submerged spar (broken tree stump) punctured her hull and the ship with all its cargo sank within minutes. The passengers and crew all escaped with their lives; the only casualty was a mule tied to the ship's rail whose owner neglected to free him before swimming for shore. Over time, the course of the Missouri changed so drastically that the Arabia wound up discovered in the late 1980s in a Kansas cornfield!
Archaeological crews exhumed the entire ship and her contents; the ship has been rebuilt complete with original working sidewheel, and the museum contains displays of all the lading of the Arabia. This includes medical supplies, household goods, preserved food, bourbon whiskey, hardware and tools, fabric and notions, readymade clothing, shoes and boots, luxury items such as china and jewelry, firearms, you name it! All of it has been painstakingly preserved and displayed. There's even a restoration lab open on one wall to the public--you can watch as technicians work to restore items before your very eyes using equipment like a freeze-dryer, dental tools, tiny brushes, etc.
What was so amazing to me was the quantity of recovered items--not just a few buttons, but thousands of them; not just one pair of shoes, but dozens; not a single bolt of cloth, but a whole stack of them. The opportunity to inspect multitudes of everyday objects of 1856 was indescribably excellent. I took some time out of my drive back to Carolina from Utah this summer to visit the museum--only a short jaunt off of the interstate highway--and am so glad that i did. I kept saying to my friend that accompanied me, "This is awesome. This is awesome!"
My main criticism of the museum is its crummy gift shop. They are on the right track with some of their items--they reproductions of some of the recovered artifacts, a couple perfumes, a tiny child's doll, a bell, a key, a button--but by and large the merchandise blows. I wanted a range of t-shirt and hoodie designs to choose from, a whole array of postcards, a coffeetable book with excellent photos and documentation, etc., and they don't have much of that. It's largely stocked with standard generic state-souvenir crap you can get at any truckstop. Disappointing. Where are the parasols, reticules, ascots, fun sutlery things that would sell like hotcakes? The museum is well worth the trip regardless; they ought to fire their merchandising director though, because i really wanted to spend a ton of money in their gift shop but there wasn't enough quality merchandise for me to purchase. I bought a necklace made from one of the calico buttons and a single postcard.
Graspy shoppy acquisitivity aside, i highly recommend the museum to anyone interested in American 19th century history, particularly those with an enthusiasm for the minutiae of daily life. It's decidedly worth checking out!
And, speaking of costume related history, I've got a link from the GBACG list via La Bricoleuse reader (and pal)
trystbat: the Danish site Tidens Toej is an amazing resource for period garments! All the text is in Danish, but it's fairly easy to navigate anyway using intuition and online translating sites. The coolest thing about the site I think is, not only do they have excellent photos of their archived garments, but they have period research images (engravings, illustrations, etc.) *&* in some cases, downloadable PDFs of patterns for the garments! I like the format of the site so much, i'm going to forward the info to the folks that run our online historic costume archive, CoSTAR!Also of interest, a page about shipwreck indigo. Essentially, dye professional Jenny Balfour Paul had the extraordinary opportunity to dye some cloth using indigo recovered in an archaeological exhumation of the Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, the flagship of a fleet of ships that sank off the Caribbean Turks Islands in 1641.
