State Museum of Pennsylvania

Once a year, on the weekend closest to my birthday, I get to impose my choice of a day trip on the other five members of the Pict family and they are not allowed to complain or picket.  Last year, everyone had to accompany me to Edgar Allan Poe’s Philadelphia home and the year before that we had a thorough wander around Laurel Hill Cemetery.  This year, for multiple reasons, my choice was to visit the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg.  I thought it would be a good opportunity to learn a bit more about the state we now call home and so it proved to be.

We began in a gallery dedicated to Pennsylvania icons.  This was a clever way to curate an eclectic array of items from stuffed animals to vintage packaging to ephemera from various industries.  I actually had not known that mountain lions had ever roamed in Pennsylvania.  1871 was when the last cougar was killed in Pennsylvania, though the last eastern mountain lion was seen in Maine in 1938.  My oldest son, snarky teen that he is, had sarcastically grumped that he was really hoping to see a coal pick so I dragged him to a display about Pennsylvania’s history of coal mining to show him the pick.  He was nowhere near as enthusiastic as he had implied he would be.  My favourite section of the icons gallery was that dedicated to big name companies based in PA because I love vintage packaging.  There were old Heinz bottles, a Tastykake tin, a cardboard Hershey’s barrel that had once held Kisses, Crayola crayon cartons, and Hires root beer bottles.  I also saw packaging from companies that I had not known were PA based – Keebler, Peeps, Zippo lighters, slinky, and Planter’s peanuts.

The reason I like vintage packaging is that I like old graphic design and commercial art and typography.  For that same reason, I enjoyed the special exhibition dedicated to war advertising.  In order to engage the kids in the idea of art as propaganda, we took turns adopting the poses depicted in the posters.  That was good fun as was the slogan “Can vegetables, fruit, and the Kaiser too”.  Nearby was a set of display cases with military items and a model of the battleship, USS Pennsylvania.

I had read that the museum had not so long ago been very moribund but that it had been given a boost when it stopped being free and started charging (admission is reasonable, though we had free entry) so they could invest in improving their displays to better showcase their exhibits and so they could obtain new items.  One of these new purchases was very striking.  From a distance, it looked like a beautiful sculpture of dangling sparkles, like an extra long chandelier; close up, however, it was arresting to discover that the sparkles were little gems inside glassine bags and that each of these bags represented an opioid death just from within Pennsylvania and just in 2017.  It was staggering and to see this visual representation of all those tragedies.

My husband was looking forward to the Civil War section, since that is one of his nerd categories, but he was disappointed because it was very much focused on the “home front” and the social history aspects of the conflict rather than the military or political history that enthuses him.  The kids and I, however, enjoyed it well enough.  Our youngest learned that he could have served as a drummer boy and the boys all got to try out stereoscopic viewfinders for the first time.  For my part, I was most struck by a display of items commemorating Gettysburg that were more like tourist trinkets than sombre reminders of a terrible, traumatic tragedy.  I found it difficult to imagine women in crinolines fanning their faces with fans depicting the battlefield at some society ball.  People can be so strange.  Mr Pict did, however, enjoy a later section in the Museum featuring Civil War items, including John Burns’ rifle.  The centrepiece of this gallery was an absolutely cast painting of the battle of Gettysburg by Peter Frederick Rothermel.  Mr Pict got really into it and explained all of the areas of action being portrayed on the canvas.  My eyes glazed over and my ears went numb.

There was an aesthetically pleasing section of the museum that had been dressed up to look like a street from times past.  It contained things like an old trough with a pump, a general store, various shop windows, and trade workshops.  My youngest was actually creeped out by the sound effects in the woodworker’s workshop.  I learned something in that section too – summer kitchens.  I had no idea summer kitchens used to be a thing, an additional building or annex room built in a shaded space and with thick stone walls so as to keep everything cool and, therefore, safely hygienic and to stop the rest of the house getting warm from the hot activities of cooking in the days before refrigeration and air conditioning.  I was aware of kitchen outbuildings only in the context of enslaved people working in them on plantations so it was new information to me that houses in various social strata had once had these.  My favourite item in this section, however, was a simple tin advertising sign that read “Pepo Worm Syrup”.  I was simply tickled by the name plus I find parasites to be fascinating (probably as an offshoot of my keen interest in pandemics).

A trip up the escalator took us to a section largely dedicated to forms of transport.  I do love the shapes of old stagecoaches and conestoga wagons but I am otherwise not that interested in vintage vehicles.  Nor are my husband or children so we were able to whip through this section at a brisk pace.  The same space also had displays, exhibits, and information about various industries of Pennsylvania such as milling of grain or textiles.  Again, industrial history is not my bag so we moved quickly.  My husband, however, did spend a bit of time in a section about the Pennsylvania Turnpike just because he has a connection, through his employment, to the turnpike.  It was actually a really nicely presented area and probably one that had some recent investment of funds and time.  We all had a good laugh when we happened upon a record of the song “Pennsylvania Turnpike, I love you” by Dick Todd and the Appalachian Wildcats and a button that let us listen to the track.  It was a hoot.

The top tier of the museum was like stepping through a portal in time to my childhood as it was all of the things I remember loving about museum visits as a kid: anthropology, dinosaurs, taxidermy, and dioramas on different scales.  I still get just as enthusiastic about these things as wee Laura did many birthdays ago.  The mannequins in the dioramas had that glossy look of mannequins from my late 1970s childhood but the dioramas themselves were well maintained and effective.  I liked the miniature dioramas best, however, because I like tiny wee fiddly things.  I was big into dinosaurs when I was a wee girl.  I was, therefore, definitely transported back to my childhood when it came to the fossils because I was very excited to see the skull of a gigantic fish and an entire mastodon skeleton, both found within Pennsylvania.  The dioramas of stuffed critters were also well done as they depicted small ecosystems instead of just being a plain old wolf among painted grass.  I learned that bison had once roamed in Pennsylvania but I also learned about how massively taxidermy techniques have improved.  An adjacent section was all about the process of preserving, stuffing, and displaying an animal carcass and seeing what the old mountain lion used to look like – stubby muzzled and cartoonish – demonstrated just how much techniques have improved.

Phew!  This post is quite long enough but I will conclude it with a postscript.  The State Museum is opposite the State Capitol.  We had visited the State Capitol in 2015, though we didn’t take a formal tour, so this time we just did a circuit of the exterior.

Then it was in the car and off to the second location for my birthday day trip ….

 

 

Ambling in Annapolis

For reasons too tedious to explain but involving leave entitlement, ceaseless winter storms, and rolling rescheduling, Mr Pict and I found ourselves spending a weekend driving to and from Washington DC.  My in-laws had flown in from England and met us there in order to then take our four children on a Spring break vacation.  Mr Pict and I, therefore, found ourselves unexpectedly child-free in Washington DC.

We spent the evening catching up with friends over dinner and wine.  Before I earned that grown up treat, however, I had to trail my husband around some Civil War sites he had never visited.  As I have previously explained, my husband spent his early teens living in the suburbs of DC.  How he managed to live there for years plus have us return from the UK to visit his parents several times without ever visiting these sites is beyond me.  However, as a Civil War nerd, it is on his bucket list to visit just about every obscure Civil War site in the nation so I was happy to indulge him and his bucket list collecting.

First up was Fort Stevens.  I don’t know why I made any sort of assumptions but I had expected the site to be a little more grand or at least cared for than it clearly was.  Instead, what I found were some mounds of earth on a patch of scrappy grass in the middle of a residential neighbourhood, a couple of canons surrounded by litter and broken glass, and the noise of a construction site that abutted the remains of the fort.  Fort Stevens’ significance rests in the fact that it was the site of the only Civil War battle to take place within the limits of the nation’s capital and it was the only time when a serving President came under enemy fire.  The history is that, in July 1864, Jubal Early’s Confederate troops decided to march on the capital following a battle in nearby Frederick.  They encountered Fort Stevens – one of a series of forts protecting the city – and there was a brief battle that repelled the Confederate soldiers.  Lincoln and his wife visited the fort and witnessed the battle, hence his coming under fire.  A rock with a bronze plaque marks the spot where Lincoln stood on the earthworks.

I was underwhelmed by Fort Stevens but the next stop on the itinerary was a little more my cup of tea in that it was a cemetery.  Battleground Cemetery contains the graves of the 40 soldiers who died in the defence of Fort Stevens and others who fought there – the last to be interred being buried there as recently as 1936.  Again there was a Lincoln connection since Abe attended the burial cemetery and dedicated the land, which makes it one of America’s smallest national cemeteries.  It was indeed a modest cemetery.  There were a few regimental memorials within its walls but the graves themselves were very small and simple and arranged in a circle.  It was well-maintained and a tiny pocket of peace and quiet despite being within a major city.

The following day we decided to stop off in Annapolis as we wended our way back to the Philly suburbs.  Being a bitterly cold Sunday in March, there was not an awful lot for us to do but wander around and absorb the charm of Annapolis’ historic district.  To give our pit stop a little more focus, we decided to visit the Maryland State House.  Occupied since the 1770s, it is the oldest state capitol in continuous use and once served as the nation’s capitol.

I started out my visit there by stopping by the statue of Thurgood Marshall.  It depicts Marshall as a young lawyer at the start of his career and behind him are pillars reading “Equal Justice Under Law”.  The sculpture also contains three other related statues: one of Donald Gaines Murray, whose case was one of Marshall’s early victories in the fight to desegregate schools, and two children who symbolise Brown V the Board of Education.  It used to be the case that a statue of Roger Taney stood on the grounds but his statue was removed last year.  I personally was glad to see Marshall celebrated at the State House and to see Taney’s absence.

Once inside, we explored the various rooms on a self-guided tour. We had the whole place virtually to ourselves so it was very relaxing and informal.  We had a peek into the current Senate and House chambers.  Mr Pict enjoyed seeing the voting buttons on each desk whereas I was enamoured of the Tiffany skylights.  The Caucus room was very dark but was filled with gleaming silverware.  This was a service from the USS Maryland which is designed with lots of references and symbols relating to the state.  I like things that are shiny but the silverware was all a bit fussy for my taste.  I wouldn’t want to keep it polished either.  Just as well I will never own a silver service set then!  Probably the most historically significant room in the State House is the Old Senate Chamber.  It was in this space, in December 1783, that George Washington resigned his commission as Commander of the Continental Army thus establishing an important precedent for America’s democracy.

Back out on the cold streets, we wandered around and poked our noses into the odd shop.  We spent a lot of time rummaging in a very cluttered, very musty, but entirely wonderful book shop.  We then wandered down to the Dock area.  There I found the statue commemorating Alex Haley, author of Roots, and Kunta Kinte, the fictionalised African ancestor of Haley’s that is the starting point of his saga.  We sat there and people- and duck-watched for a bit before walking back through the old streets and back to the car.

This was my first visit to Annapolis since I first visited in 1995 and I had forgotten how quaint and attractive it is.  At some point we will have to return with the kids, in warmer temperatures, and when there is more to do.

The Pennsylvania State Capitol

After our visit to the National Civil War Museum, we drove to the State Capitol down State Street.  What a spectacular view!  It is a very grand and imposing complex, full of interesting angles and shapes and topped with a fabulous dome.  The current – and sixth – capitol building dates from 1906 and is a splendid example of that era’s architecture, known as American Renaissance.

We parked up and decided to go for a wander around the exterior of the building.  This involved an amble through the grounds, a public park dominated by a monument dedicated to the dead of the Mexican-American War.  It is a 64 foot column topped by a guardian angel.

I was most taken by the building’s magnificent dome which is covered in green glazed terracotta tiles.  Apparently it is modelled on the dome of St Peter’s Basilica, weighs 24,000 tonnes and is 94 feet in diameter.  The dome is completed at its summit by a golden statue named Commonwealth – though sometimes named Letitia for William Penn’s daughter.  She stands on a 4 foot globe and holds a staff of justice which is topped by a garland and eagle.  Unfortunately the east facade of the building  was undergoing extensive renovation on the day of our visit so areas were roped off, there was construction equipment everywhere and, most annoyingly, the fountains were switched off.  Nevertheless we had a good nose around as much as we could tolerate in the absolutely baking heat.

Then – an unexpected treat – we got to go inside!  We had not anticipated being permitted to visit given how stringent security checks have to be these days.  However, a friendly security guard processed us all quickly and soon we were admitted entrance.  The security guard pointed us in the direction of a free guided tour but unfortunately our parking meter was going to run out before it concluded so we had to give that a miss.  Next time maybe.  Instead we just had a little amble around ourselves.

We saw a lego version of the Commonwealth statue and a beautiful model of William Penn’s ship Welcome.  My 9 and 6 year old’s loved watching a model designed to show the workings of law making but which they just enjoyed as a kinetic sculpture, like a large marble run.  Having entered on the east side, we took an escalator up and then some stairs down in order to reach the west side, which is much more grand and imposing and really ought to have been the entrance we took to get the full impact.  There we saw the rotunda with its spectacularly grand staircase sweeping upwards through the space.  The bottom of the stairs were flanked by angels holding up glowing globes.  I loved their elegant lines and the sweep of their wings.

The decoration of the rotunda itself is stunning.  I loved the four paintings by Edwin Austin Abbey that symbolised Science, Religion, Justice and Art.  All of the murals in the Capitol’s interior were wonderful but I thought those were particularly beautiful.  We also all enjoyed seeing the floor which was decorated with Moravian tiles by Henry Chapman Mercer.  These were mosaics forming pictorial representations of Pennsylvania’s  history, industry, flora and fauna.  The kids liked the bat best because it looked like Batman’s symbol.

 

I wish we could have spent longer exploring the Capitol but I am sure we will return to Harrisburg at some point.  For this trip, however, our parking meter was about to run out so it was time to leave the cool, shade and peace of the Capitol and emerge back out onto the roasting streets and clamber back into the sweltering car.  The boys were very glad that our hotel had a swimming pool to play around in after such a hot day.