I do enjoy going to little small town museums (I should probably cover a few of the local ones more…) - and as part of a car club meet out in Washington this year, we spent a couple hours at the Carousel Museum in Bickleton, Washington. Bickleton is a standard enough “bump in the road” sort of rural town, not really between here nor there - but, in this case, on a road that takes a properly nice bit of scenic winding through a canyon on the way there! And it has an important bit of “This is a good place to spend some time” marker, visible in this photo: A couple BMW motorcycles, with the expected “old retired guys” having breakfast in the Blue Bird Inn cafe on the left.

The Carousel Museum is at one end of town, and serves as both storage for the carousel horses and wagons, as well as a sort of “general area history” museum. It’s a nicely funded little place, with a lot of worthwhile exhibits, and given the curvy roads required to get there, well worth a trip - especially on a motorcycle!

The Carousel Equipment

One of the main purposes of the museum is to store the restored ponies and wagons of the town carousel - a 1905 Herschell-Spillman, set up and used once a year on the rodeo weekend. The rest of the year, the equipment is stored indoors. They’ve all been restored over the years, and the details of the restoration for each component are available as well.

These are generally in a ring around one half of the museum to review as you go around the other exhibits.

Scenes in the Round

An interesting way of laying things out I’ve not seen before is the use of “wedge” scenes. A square section in the center of the floor has walls making an “X” and then a center square, leaving some truncated wedges of space. In addition to making for a good display space, it’s a bit of a visual trick to make the spaces look longer. Here, some shortened pews from a local church and an old organ make for a late 1800s-esque church scene, with history about the local churches scattered around.

As is pretty common in most local sort of museums, local wildlife features in an exhibit - most of these have been trapped locally and donated the the museum over time.

What I absolutely didn’t expect was one of the most comprehensive documentations I’ve ever seen of varieties of barbed wire. I’ve only captured a few of the dozen or so panes of this display, but it absolutely the most detailed collection of this stuff I’ve ever seen.

I’ve no idea how they collected all this stuff - or if it was re-made with modern materials. But there are radically more ways to make “spiked wire to discourage wildlife” than I’d ever imagined!

The schoolroom exhibit has most of what you’d expect of this general style of museum as well - a range of old desks, photos of the schools, and the ever-present photo of George Washington that people of a certain age just expect out of schoolrooms. There’s a good map of what schools are where, and assorted 1950s style high school sweaters as well.

It also contains a copy of the “1872 Rules for Teachers” poster, available in the gift shop. I assume this is a replica of something that was common enough, given how frequently I see it floating around. Filling lamps daily makes sense to me… though a good lamp only needs filling every few days.

Moving further around, there’s a late 1800s to early 1900s kitchen, of the sort likely found out west in rural areas. You’ve got a big icebox in the back right, and a standard counter/cabinet with all sorts of useful attachments on the left. The counter on the right has large flour bins in the bottom - it seems to be designed for bread-work.

Reflecting the times, you didn’t buy root beer from the store in bottles. You made it with some assorted extracts and such! This is probably better than the current way of buying things from the store with no idea that you’ve got 5 pounds of sugar dissolved in your water…

And finally, some technologies are simply mature and don’t need to change. We have a modern version of this to sweep the gym floor for church, and it’s functionally exactly the same. No batteries even needed - just run it around on the floor, and the mechanical mechanism spins a brush from the wheels, tucking everything up into the bins on the end.

Continuing around, solid evidence for “No matter what it is, someone, somewhere, is collecting it” - a decent collection of very good condition steering wheel center hubs from a range of cars in the 1940s. As much as I prefer having the horn there, I can’t deny that there was some really good looking art that used to go there!

This wheat doll is as old as I am, give or take - it was made for the 1981 Washington Wheat Growers Convention, and these were made as centerpieces for the banquet tables. Consider this when you’re planning things as table centerpieces - if you just use cheap plastic, it’ll get discarded. If you make something impressive out of natural materials, it’s likely to well outlast a lot of people at the banquet. I would love to see a return to more hands-on crafting approaches to decorations, and it’s something I need to consider for some events we have planned.

Arrowhead Displays

The arrowhead collection is spread throughout the museum, and it’s quite well presented - not just rows upon rows of arrowheads, but art made of the arrowheads that stands on its own.

Military History

A common enough feature of small town museums is a bit of the local military service history, and it’s here as expected - a wall of photos of people from the area (usually county, sometimes wider) who have served, and a collection of artifacts from their service.

Down in the lower left of the display case, there are a few things that I expect aren’t terribly common anymore, likely brought back with people after the war was over. Several of the older men on our tour were rather surprised to see these on display.

There’s also a collection of blankets, or throws, from the WWII era, back before the Air Force had separated out.

Pyrex Collection

If someone makes it, someone else collects it. I’d never considered a Pyrex collection as something one might gather, but sure enough, here’s Pyrex kitchenware throughout the ages!

I assume some of the advertising was out of magazines, based on the whole “Vintage Mag Ads” logo. But, if you’ve ever wondered if there was a twin compartment casserole dish designed to have candle warmers, now you know! And it’s designed for two packages of frozen food - guess the era, here.

Early 1900s Era

Telephones, adding machines, and other sort of “bank clerk” material is collected over in one area - I’m sure we’ve gained something moving to LCD panels for computers, but we’ve also lost something in the translation.

I don’t know why, but I really like the old “green glass” style desk lamps, and I may consider one for my office. There’s also been a resurgence in interest in the old typewriters, so I expect more than a few will get rotated out of museums and back into regular service in the years to come.

In the front, and on the left, instruments for making music. In the rear, equipment for playing recorded music that would eventually drive most of the “make it yourself” equipment out of style. Why sing as a group when you could just listen to someone else sing? It’s certainly easier, but as our church lifegroup has gotten back into singing hymns together (we have our own hymnals, collected from at least a dozen other hymnals over the years, including a few collection-style hymnals that are exactly what we’re doing, just from 100+ years ago), there’s a lot lost in the move to recorded music. If you can get a group together to start singing in person again, I suggest it! It’s not a lost art yet, but it’s heading that way.

Gas pumps! The style on the right is interesting if you’re not familiar with how they work. The clear glass globe at the top is filled to the desired level, and then it drains down through the hose into your car’s tank. You don’t just “fill ‘er up!” - you need to have a good estimate of how many gallons the tank will fit before you start the process, or it’s going to make a mess. I’m pretty sure there’s a way to drain the excess back into the underground tanks, but it’s a far less precise process than the metering pumps that keep track of both the amount of fuel and the cost as you pump.

Several walls of tools make for a fun “What is that for?” game with a group of people!

Another common feature of most small towns, somewhere (it may be a museum, it may be somewhere else, but I guarantee, it’s around somewhere!) is the local collection of brands. They’re registered somewhere, but it’s also quite common to see them on display somewhere public enough, so you don’t have to go through the central office if you happen to find some livestock wandering around. I assume that most people who deal with livestock know the local brands of everyone else pretty well.

Finally, a laundry room that seems to be of the 1930s-1950s era, based on the equipment. I recognize some of it from my grandparents house, though I never actually saw the ironing roller get used.

Wagons!

Finally, in the back corner of the museum, there’s a covered wagon that actually came across on the Oregon Trail. The story told is that someone locally bought a wagon to use as yard art and a planter, but after they picked it up they realized it was in far too good condition to let sit outside, so it got donated to the museum under the condition that it would be kept inside. There’s a lot of Oregon Trail sort of displays out west, for obvious reasons, and it’s still just staggering to think about packing everything you have into a wagon and heading west like this. On the other hand, we’ve lost a lot with the lack of any frontiers. They’re a good vent-valve for people in built up areas, and, no, I don’t think “Space, the Final Frontier” is likely to happen any time soon.

Does this bring back computer lab memories for anyone else? If you continue hunting, game may become scarce…

And I was happy to see an old Air Pilot lantern. This would have been produced in the late 1930s to early 1950s, so quite a bit later than the wagon. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be in operating condition, unlike some lanterns at a slightly more local to me museum I saw recently, hanging outside, burning merrily.

Outside Displays

The usual old mechanical equipment is laying around outside - this is a clutch mechanism for some equipment, with friction lining in the center drum to connect torque through when you throw the lever. I’m pretty sure safety mechanisms included “Don’t put your hands where they obviously don’t belong.”

Visit Bickleton!

There’s a little more information and an old map outside as well.

So, if you’re looking for a good excuse to take a motorcycle or car out on some winding roads, drop into Bickleton!