River Raisin Reenactment in Monroe, Michigan

Once again this year I was able to attend the annual reenactment of the Battle of the River Raisin in Monroe Michigan. It's a unique event for us 1812 reenactors, since it occurs well off the normal season of the hobby and is staged on private land next door to the battlefield National Park (because of the NPS rules against opposing line tactical demonstrations). The reenactors sign in at a hockey rink, and then stage from the rink's parking lot for a brief battle in an empty lot next door, then march to a memorial program at the National Park Service visitor center a block away. It's a small event but I'm proud to be able to honor the men who fought there in this small way.

This year I was part of the British artillery crews. Since the Americans at the historical battle had no artillery with them, when we take our cannon the American artillery switches sides for the event. British Royal Artillery wore a blue coat with red facings and yellow tape, same as the Americans, so we actually look correct from a distance.

Afterwards there was a program given by the NPS ranger from Perry's Victory and International Peace Memorial at South Bass Island, covering the naval campaign of 1813 on Lake Erie and the Battle of September 10, 1813. Even I learned new things.



The Monroe County Museum occupies an old post office downtown. I was interested to find a collection of old maps of the area on display, particularly an 1817 engineers survey of the military road between the Maumee River and Spring Wells. You can still visit a section of the corduroy road, as I did a few years ago.








For more information on the Monroe County Museum, check out their website: http://www.co.monroe.mi.us/officials_and_departments/departments/museum/index.php

Touring a 1911 Great Lakes Iron Ore Freighter

The centerpiece of the Toledo, Ohio waterfront is a 600-foot long retired iron ore freighter named the Colonel Schoonmaker (formerly the Willis Boyer). She (or he, as the ore boats are sometimes referred as) was commissioned the year before the Titanic, and sailed the lakes until 1980. This past year the venerable ship was moved from her old berth at International Park to a new one just upriver from the I-280 bridge in East Toledo. I was recently able to get a close-up look at the newly restored ship.

 My virtual tour will start from the stern, where the engine room, steering gear, mess rooms and the engineers and steward's departments lived.

Toledo's National Museum of the Great Lakes

This past weekend I had the chance to visit the Great Lakes Historical Society's new museum on the waterfront in Toledo. I've been a fan of their museum at Vermilion, Ohio since I was a child.

I was a little nervous whether this new incarnation would be too watered-down. Although the exhibits were more focused on a younger set, they managed to convey a lot of good information, and were more organized and thematically focused than the previous museum. On the other hand, the architects did not leave any real space for expansion, so there was a limited amount of room for more artifacts or, presumably, travelling or temporary exhibits. 

The museum no longer has the pilot house of the Canopus, nor the steam engine of a great lakes tug (both were probably left at the Inland Seas archives in Vermillion). However, the real centerpiece, the restored 1911 freighter S.S. Colonel Schoonmaker, more than makes up for their absence. I'll get into the ship in my next post, though.

There are a few poignant artifacts from the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald, the famous ore freighter lost with all hands during a November storm in 1975.

Threshing Wheat the 1890s Way At Slate Run Farm

Columbus Metroparks' Slate Run Farm is running its horse-powered, mechanical thresher this Saturday, from 9-4. My family and I stopped by on Tuesday afternoon to find the farm workers tinkering with the 100-year old machine, which uses drive shafts from a capstan pulled by horses for power.

The Wright Brothers Bicycle Shop

Last week my family and I visited the Dayton Aviation Heritage Park, an urban enclave of restored turn-of-the-century houses and shops near downtown Dayton, Ohio. It was here in the bicycle shop of the Wright brothers (Wilbur and Orville) that modern fixed-wing aviation was born. Unfortunately the shop itself was closed for lunch but we got a good look from the outside. The visitors center and museum was also well worth a visit, honoring not only the Wright brothers but the African American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar. 

Apparently the Wright brothers ran a print shop before turning to bicycles and gliders, so part of the museum is done up to look like a print shop with a general store on the ground floor. In a typical Parks-service anxiety to please as many people as possible, they had museums-within-museums devoted to the poet Dunbar and parachutes. We evaded the rangers offer of a 30-minute interpretive film--why does every historical museum on the planet have one? If anyone in charge of a museum or historical site reads this, for God's sake upload your film to youtube and perhaps embed links to it in the physical exhibit space-- and shell out for a wireless router, so people can watch the relevant parts as they walk around or bookmark them for later. 

Talking about Trains....

This weekend I had the opportunity to visit a great piece of local transportation history: the Ohio Railway Museum in Worthington Ohio (990 Proprietors Road-- open 12-4pm Sundays). The museum sits on the old rail line of the Columbus, Marion and Delaware interurban electric railroad. Founded in 1948, the museum had fallen into decay before a local group of volunteers took it over a couple of years ago. Since then they have been working hard to restore the museum's short stretch of rail line and the cars themselves. 

The museum is very kid-friendly, although it is also basically a railroad junkyard so close parental attention is in order. I took my 6-month old son for his first experience of railroad travel.

The No. 578 steam locomotive looms over the rest of the equipment in the yard. It was built in 1910 and served between 1917 and 1944 on a Ohio railroad. Its top speed was 70 miles per hour, not bad for a mountain of cast iron and steel!

The museum lacks the expertise or resources (or space, really) to run a steam locomotive, so they use two more modest locomotives to pull their cars. This electric switcher was once used to pull coal cars beneath a power plant.

Mass transit, pre 1970s style. The museum is proud of its interurban heritage and sports a number of old trolleys and cars which used various means of propulsion. Unfortunately, many of the older trolleys were made of wood and are quickly rotting away under exposure to the elements.

Inside one of the better-preserved trolleys. For those of us familiar with Central Ohio's mass transit system, it's a bit sad to think of the intricate network of light rail systems that once tied Columbus' neighborhoods together.

Several of the older passenger cars were slowly rusting and rotting apart, but the excursion car, a 1930s vintage Canadian National Railways coach, was clean and nicely painted. Although many of the old benches and seats had started to spill out their horsehair guts, you could see the glamour that even ordinary rail travel carried in the early 20th century.

One of the more interesting specimens was a hybrid, self-propelled car, which had an engine in the front and a passenger compartment in the back half. Coupled to a couple of other cars, this train would have plied the short lines linking smaller cities in the waning days of passenger rail service.

What the Ohio Railroad Museum could really use is a shed to shelter its historic equipment from the elements, and a lot of mechanical and upholstery work on its cars. The legacy of the interurban lines and early 20th century light rail is here to see and walk around in. In a new century when people are moving back into the city and automobiles are becoming less sustainable as a transportation system, the museum is not a collection of decaying relics-- it is an ark for lost technologies and ideas whose time may come again.

Visiting the Detroit Historical Society

 Fort Detroit. A scale diorama depicting Detroit in the 1790s before it was turned over to Americans; the Fort and pickets around the town are identical to the defenses as they existed in 1812. The British burned the fort when they retreated from the area in 1813, but the Americans rebuilt it and renamed it Fort Shelby, pretty much on the original plan.

Last weekend, we had planned to stage a big, reenactors-only wargame version of the Battle of the Thames, but rain intervened. So I found myself getting on the road home mid morning on Sunday. Unlike Benson Lossing, the 1860s historian and travel writer who toured the battlefield before writing his epic War of 1812 narrative, I wanted to visit the nearby village of Moraviantown. For some reason, the local police had closed the road from Thamesville and I was forced to turn back. (The Moravians were Christian Indians who had originally settled in eastern Ohio: following a massacre which I've detailed elswhere in this blog, they moved to Upper Canada. General Harrison had their village burned down, because it supposedly harbored supplies and weapons for the British.) 

I had been wanting to visit the Detroit Historical Society--near the campus of Wayne State University in urban Detroit-- for a while, and I jumped at the opportunity this time.

Abandoned automobile plant. Albert Duce via wikipedia.

Detroit has fallen on hard times, in fact it has been in a constant state of decay since before I was born. However, the Big Three automakers are still headquartered in the general vicinity, and seem to be doing all right, considering the recession. Detroit deserves better. For all of us who grew up in rustbelt cities around the Great Lakes region, it has always stood as a figurehead of a vanished industrial, blue collar civilization. In Michigan, or so I hear, economic development has migrated towards Grand Rapids, and non-union employers like Amway. Detroit is therefore a kind of avatar for American labor and heavy industry in general.

My interest, though, is mainly in the old Detroit, before the Industrial Revolution(s) had really swept across the American Midwest. Detroit was built on the fur trade: it was really the gateway to the upper Great Lakes, a place where the government and powerful trading companies like Jacob Astor's firm could set up warehouses (called factories) to exchange manufactured goods for furs. The War of 1812 transformed Detroit, as it did many frontier towns, by eliminating British influence from the American northwestern territories, clearing the road for Astor and other American firms to dominate the fur trade. 

Lewis Cass in the 1850s.

For many years after the war, a former Ohio general named Lewis Cass presided over the territory. Cass was a big deal-- he served as Territorial Governor until 1831, as US Secretary of War, and as Senator once Michigan became a state. He was only one of several Northwestern Army officers to play important roles in the development of the frontier. In the wake of the Thames Campaign both he and fellow Ohioan (and future Ohio governor) Duncan McArthur were placed in charge of occupying former British-held territories. Cass graduated directly from command of a brigade of 12-months regular infantrymen to being the Governor of Michigan in 1813.

Duncan McArthur.

McArthur, after a brief stint at Sackett's Harbor and testifying at the William Hull court martial returned to take up command of the 8th Military District, with headquarters at Detroit. Both men ended the war where they had started it: Cass and McArthur had led Ohio Volunteer Militia regiments as colonels during the debacle of the first Northwestern Army's campaign.

But I digress. When I travel, I take pictures as a reference as well as a souvenir. Since I'm interested in recreating the past as well as educating the public about it, I spend a great deal of time getting pictures of museum exhibits and historical sites wherever I go. This blog constitutes a virtual museum, as well as a commentary on how museum exhbits are constructed and how well they convey whatever information they are meant to communicate.

 

A young Lewis Cass.  Below: the town in fur trading days.

The museum was arranged on three floors, and was free for the public (parking in the rear lot was $5). The basement featured a "streets of yesteryear" walkthough--something I've encountered at Columbus COSI, Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, Cincinatti's history museum, and many others. This one was fairly elaborate but not well interpreted. Some of the storefronts were simply repositories for old collections the curators didn't have anyplace else to display. Static collections behind glass are inert and can never be wholly successful in engaging the visitor.

The 1840s:

(What's the story here? It looks like a widow is visiting the banker. Is she selling off her dead husbands military land bounty, or getting a loan?)

(The pavement is one of the fun things about "streets of yesterday" type exhibits. It transitions from asphalt, to bricks, then cobblestone, and mud--or in this case, pitch and wood. Chicago had this type of pavement before the Great Fire!)

The 1870s:

The 1900s:

The first floor or main level featured a number of exhibits, including the early history of Detroit, the automobile industry, and a Kid Rock "Rock lab."

 The early history section was a broad survey of developments leading up to the city's industrialization in the late 19th century. It featured a handful of artifacts, and more dioramas. Unfortunately, most of the static displays were almost deliberately badly lit with can lights, making photography difficult.

 African Americans played an important role in the early years of Detroit. Since the Michigan Territory was free and the neighboring Upper Canada a slave province, in the years before the War of 1812 several slaves escaped from Canada into the United States. A few years later, the traffic would run in the other direction.

The famous steamship Walk-in-the-Water, named after a Huron chief who defected from Tecumseh on the eve of the Battle of the Thames and offered his services to General Harrison. The ship was launched in 1818, a year after her namesake died, and ran from Buffalo to Detroit, until she sank some years later.

There was a two-story exhibit on the auto plants, featuring  a 50-foot or so long section of assembly line from the 1970s. Once again, its a static display, so a bit hard to tell what's going on.

On the next floor, there was a large exhibit on railroads. This is a model of a monorail design proposed for Detroit in 1918...

A second model train display had been installed in the basement, near the streets of yesteryear. The lights and model trains (and a train-themed playlist) activate once someone enters the room. One of the trains had a small video camera mounted on it, which displayed in real time on a couple of tv sets mounted above. It was reminiscent of the scene in the Addams Family movie when Gomez Addams takes out his frustrations on his model train set.

All things considered, the Detroit Historical Society is well worth a visit if you're passing through the city, for the perspective it provides on the growth and subsequent decline of the Queen of the Rust Belt.