I just returned from a mini vacation which included a trip down the Natchez Trace Parkway, Shiloh Battlefield, and Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area. Along the way, I managed to see other forms of historical preservation.The Natchez Trace Parkway was one interesting way to view preservation. The parkway is built roughly parallel to the old Natchez Trace. The NPS keeps the old Trace mowed, and has signs indicating where it is in relation to the modern paved route. In addition to the road itself, there were several historic sites where one could pull off of the road to view, such as the grave of Meriwether Lewis. My best description of the parkway was to see it as an "isolation chamber." One gets at least an essence of what it must have been like to travel down the trace in the days before steamboats made the road obsolete. At Shiloh, it was interesting to see some conflicting preservation concepts together. The park's visitor center and bookstore are of modern construction, but built to resemble an antebellum mansion and a store of the same period. They represent no specific structures, at least nothing that was on the battlefield in 1862. While I am a fan of traditional architecture, I can see how these buildings can lead to some misrepresentation of what the area looked like. I did learn to appreciate some of the NPS's more recent preservation strategies. Old roads which criss-cross the battlefield are mowed and marked, crops are growing (albeit soybeans) where crops were growing in 1862, and peach trees have been recently planted where peach trees were during the battle. It appears as if the Park Service is really trying to make the place look more like it did at the time of the battle, minus all of the granite monuments.The last place I visited was Land Between the Lakes (LBL), created by the TVA starting in the 1930s by damming up the nearly parallel Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers in far western Kentucky. At LBL, the TVA runs a historic exhibit known as "The Homeplace 1850" which is a collection of historic buildings found in the area, including a couple of log cabins, and a few barns. Costumed interpreters run the farm and feed the animals much like they did in the 1850s. The interpreters act as if all they know is the world of 1850. Overall, it is an interesting concept, somewhat like a smaller version of Colonial Williamsburg but with a more authentic feel.Near LBL is Fort Donelson, a Confederate fort on the Cumberland River. I had visited the fort about 10 years ago, and was suprised at some of the changes. The NPS, in an effort to protect the original earthen defenses of the fort has gotten fairly strict about walking on or near the original fortifications. This is good, as it will preserve the fortifications for the future. Finally, I managed to stop and take a picture of the wood fired iron furnace. A neat piece of industrial history, that included an explanatory marker. Parts of Kentucky were considered big iron producers, until the timber supply ran out. Overall, it was an interesting way to see different historic preservation strategies, and how some are successful, while others are not. Overlooking the Cumberland River A wood-fired iron furnace

This post is not at all off-topic.A thread of a couple weeks ago was started with the query, "What makes a good railroad museum?" I felt that there was one word too many in that question. Why would a good railroad museum be any different from a good museum, period? There is a whole body of expertise in museum practice that organizers of railroad museums tend to ignore, to the detriment of our institutions and the boredom of our customers.When railroad museum volunteers travel, we tend only to see other railroad museums. For variation, we might see a ship or airplane museum, but the environment there may not be much different.There's a lot to be learned from visiting other breeds of museums. Even before my family began rebelling at seeing more old-machine collections, I managed to take away a few lessons from other museums. Here, from my dim recollections, is a quick summary.At the Fort William recreation in Thunder Bay, Ontario, I saw probably the best and most thorough job of re-enactment by actors thoroughly in the character of 1820's fur traders and soldiers. This showed me how much this kind of show can contribute. They guys at Fort Michilimackinac in Mackinac City, Michigan weren't bad, either, but they weren't INTO it like the players in Fort William. (Don't waste time on the 200 other 1800-era fort museums in Ontario.)At the city history museum in South Bend, I saw how much sense it makes to put a museum where the people are - in this case, a shopping mall. They did a superb job of presenting the industrial history of that city. (The National Studebaker Museum was cool, too, but only for guys who REALLY like the Avanti and the Studebaker Dictator.) When you visited the Central of Georgia roundhouse in Savannah, did you visit the city history museum in the freight house next door? If not, you missed a great exhibit on the city's history, and its relation to the C of G, which ran like a thick thread through the exhibits.You can build a good museum around a single technology. Just do it like the wooden-boat museum and yacht restoration school I found in Newport Rhode Island, or the Hiram Walker whisky museum at Kitchener, Ontario. These places benefitted from the persistant interest by rich people in yachts, and the persistant thirst by everyone for booze, so they had money to play with, but they used it well. The Hagley Museum built around the DuPont powder works in Wilmington gets an honorable mention, and so does the Oil Museum of Canada at Petrolia, Ontario, for a low-budget version of the same thing. The industrial-archeology playground for adults at Butte, Montana was a good use of the yard-of-junk that tends to accumulate behind all our museums.The Inventure Place and Inventors Hall of Fame and the New Mexico Museum of Natural History showed me that it is much easier to raise money for a showy exhibit hall than to find high-content, engaging exhibits to fill it. This is not a bad problem to have, but some railroad museums are becoming successful enough to have it.History, art, and natural-science museums are all sources of inspiration and good ideas that can be stolen for free, and also of disasters to be avoided if you can.

As Aarne said, this is positively on-topic for discussion here. There is a tremendous amount of knowledge we can learn from observing how other museums do things, especially those which preserve large, deteriorating objects like we do. When you visit the National Trust's website, it becomes obvious that most historic sites and museums struggle for funding just as ours do, with the ship people having the biggest task ahead. I don't get to travel much, but always include other types of museums and historic sites when I do, just for comparison. Personally, I find true historic sites the most interesting, over more generic collections.What would be even more interesting would be to learn how people whose main interests lie in other types of history view our rail-oriented museums and hear their comments and suggestions.

Going where the people are, or near, is a good part of what makes a museum successful. Shiloh, on the other hand, is in a place where you have to want to go there, to get there. I was surprised at the high number of visitors at the park, but given the popularity of the Civil War, I can understand why it would be a popular location. LBL on the other hand, is a relatively popular area for water-related recreation. I always notice the large number of Tennessee, Illinois, and Missouri license plates in the parking lot of the state park lodge. Having such a large draw of people there for vacation makes a museum like "The Homeplace-1850" an attraction with a built-in audience.The David Wilkins summer road trip continues later this week. I should be at the Seashore Trolley Museum on Saturday. Photos and report will follow shortly. I’m also working on a jaunt to IRM over the Labor Day weekend.