After touring the popcorn museum, we wandered around the other museum in the same building. This was essentially a local historical society, with all the typical local historical society museum stuff donated by people who don’t know what else to do with grandpa’s suit or grandma’s pincushion collection. There were a few exhibits that were more notable, however. Like Napoleon’s horse, Prince Imperial.
The horse didn’t belong to Napoleon Bonaparte, but to his nephew, Emperor Napoleon III. It was claimed that the horse had the longest mane in the world — 9 feet, 10 inches (with a tail seven feet long). A local breeder traveled to France in 1869 and bought the horse for $3,000. Back in the States, he exhibited the horse as “The Greatest Living Curiosity of This or Any Other Age.” Which seems to be doing it up a bit rich, if you ask me.
The horse died in 1888, but that didn’t stop the clever businessman. He had the horse stuffed and mounted and displayed it during the summer. In the winter, he kept it in his living room. The breeder passed the horse on to his sons and their sons and then it was sold to another showman who put it on wheels and pulled it in parades. Eventually, probably about the time there was nobody left who knew who Emperor Napoleon III was, the horse was donated to the museum.
There was a display about Harding in the basement, but it mostly consisted of photographs of photographs.
Here I am sitting at a desk from Harding’s newspaper office.
And here’s the red chair in a chair from the Harding’s home.
The museum was open from 1-4 on this Sunday afternoon. We arrived around 2 and left around 3:20 and there were no other visitors during that time. I think it’s safe to make a claim that we were the only visitors on the day. We were greeted at the door by two kind women, one of whom really, really wanted to give us a guided tour. We declined, but she followed us anyway and showed us several working popcorn machines. She was hovering again when we went into the main museum and jumped in to tell us things whenever we showed more than just a passing interest. She was very kind and seemingly knowledgeable, but she was not a gift speaker and a guided tour would have taken a great deal longer than we thought the museum warranted.
At one point she got an embarrassed look on her face, put her hands up over her mouth, and said, “I probably shouldn’t say anything about this.” Then she took us into the next room and showed us this photograph, just donated to the museum, of Harding’s mistress, Carrie Phillips. It’s a bit distorted because I had to photograph it at an angle through the glass case.
As we wandered about, a guy came in with his dog. He claimed to be another volunteer, but immediately got into a lengthy argument with the woman in the gift shop about whether the Bible is reliable or not. His view, of course, is that it isn’t. The woman remained unshaken in her faith (she sounded like a committed Christian) and did what she could to end the conversation. The guy would have none of it and pontificated at length while we walked around in the next room listening in and rolling our eyes at his inflated opinion of his own intellect. When we walked out, he attempted to engage us in conversation, but we answered minimally and got past him with little trouble. His dog, which was a lot more pleasant than the guy, wandered around after us and seemed to share our desire to be at a distance from him.
There was a room in the basement done up to look like an old general store, which basically means that it was done up to be a dumping grounds for any old product they could get their hands on.
