On Friday, Gerry and I took a little jaunt across the beautiful Finger Lakes area of Central New York to Hammonsport. Gerry wanted to visit a motorcycle museum. We had a lovely drive observing the villages, hamlets and countryside. We had a fine lunch at an excellent restaurant. It was a beautiful day, though hot. Fortunately, we were always in air-conditioning.
Actually, the Glenn Hammond Curtiss museum covered bicycles, motorcycles, and airplanes, as well as a little bit of everything else. It followed chronologically the life of Glenn Curtiss, whose life and career covered from about the early nineteen hundreds through the 1950's. It was quite interesting. He was an expert in motors, and eventually produced thousands of airplanes. In fact, much of the success of aviation can be attributed to his innovations and engineering inventions.
For some reason or another (it was not connected to Curtiss's time frame) there was a Civil War exhibit in the entryway. A life size statue was dressed in a Union soldier's blue uniform. I quipped to Gerry, "So that's what the enemy looked like." I was absolutely joking, but truthfully, the civil war is still not a joking matter to many of my southerner relatives.
So in homage to my heritage, I stood with the confederacy! (Probably because most of the rest of the museum was really a guy thing!)
The thing that I found most fascinating was that the uniforms from the Civil War were all clearly hand stitched! It was hard for me to imagine the women of that era sitting at home sewing uniforms while the men went off to fight. Obviously, some of them did.
It was, perhaps, the one thing from the whole museum that stood out in my mind the most!
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