The W.W. Mayo House was home to both the Mayo and Cosgrove families, who would go on to found the Mayo Clinic and Green Giant Food Company respectively. The home was hand-built by W.W. Mayo in 1859, and today is open as a fully restored historic house museum.
The home offers tours by costumed guides. The website offers a brief history of the home and visitor information.
Winter Quarters Plantation is one of the few true Southern-style plantations to survive the Civil War. The home was built in 1805, and eventually grew to over 2,000 acres, manned by 300 slaves. The home was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, and today serves as a historic house museum. The home is furnished with period furnishings, and contains copies of diaries and other personal records from the tenants.
The home offers tours, interpretive programs and events, and special tours for field trips. The website offers a history of the site, visitor information, links to nearby attractions, and a virtual tour.
Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park is the site of California’s largest "hydraulic" mine. Visitors can see huge cliffs carved by mighty streams of water, results of the gold mining technique of washing away entire mountains to find the precious metal. Legal battles between mine owners and downstream farmers ended this method. The park also contains a 7,847 foot bedrock tunnel that served as a drain. The visitor center has exhibits on life in the old mining town of North Bloomfield.
The park offers exhibits, tours, and occasional educational and recreational events.
The Dutch Colonial Revival Pearce-McAllister Cottage, built in 1899, reflected the original owners' desires to have a cottage similar to those seen in the older districts of the eastern United States. The second owners, the McAllisters, remodeled the interior in the 1920s decor seen in the home. Today, the Pearce-McAllister Cottage is home to the Denver Museum of Miniatures, Dolls, and Toys, which manages the site, and has exhibits throughout the house. The collection encompasses more than 10,000 items dating from 1680 through today.
A second website, focusing more closely on the Denver Museum of Miniatures, Dolls, and Toys that occupies the cottage, can be found here.
The cottage offers exhibits, tours, workshops, educational programs, and occasional recreational and educational events.
The Bucks County Historical Society seeks to make the presentation of historical information both engaging and relevant to everyday life. To this end, the society operates the Mercer Museum, Fonthill Museum, and Spruance Library. The Mercer Museum, housed within a 1916 structure, presents pre-Industrialization artifacts of daily life. Exhibit topics include illumination, medicine, tinsmithing, transportation, and dairy farming, among more than 60 early American trades. The Spruance Library is housed within the Mercer Museum. The 1912 Fonthill Museum is a historic home. Once home to Henry Chapman Mercer (1856-1930), anthropologist, antiquarian, archaeologist, and designer of renowned Moravian tile, the Byzantine, Gothic, and Medieval structure is now furnished in period style. Many of the pieces are original to the site and their locations within the home.
The society offers exhibits, period rooms, guided tours of the Fonthill Museum, curriculum-based programs, curriculum-based traveling trunks, curriculum-based outreach presentations, concerts, workshops for children and teenagers, summer camps, Act 48 workshops, research library access, collections access, and research services. Reservations are strongly advised for the Fonthill Museum. The Mercer Museum is approximately 65 percent wheelchair accessible. The Fonthill Museum is wheelchair accessible on the first floor only. Collections access is by appointment only. A fee is charged for research conducted upon request. The website offers pre- and post-visit materials and an online catalog.
The Museum tells the story of the people who came from Europe to work in the anthracite mining and textiles industries. On a tour of the facility visitors will experience the lives of proud people who endured harsh working conditions yet carved out communities filled with tradition. The diverse collection highlights life in the mines, mills, and factories. Visitors are welcomed into the families' homes and neighborhoods with a moment of reflection in the kitchen, a visit to the pub, or a seat in a local church.
The museum offers exhibits, tours, trolley rides, research library access, and occasional recreational and educational events.
Visitors to the Homestead can see the early home, factories, and farm where Washington Duke first grew and processed tobacco. His sons later founded The American Tobacco Company, the world's largest tobacco company. Duke and others helped create a market for Durham-area tobacco products that eventually would turn North Carolina into the heart of an international tobacco empire. Many profits were invested in land and industries but others were used for such humanitarian causes as Duke University, named for the family. The tour includes the Duke family's restored home, an early factory, a curing barn, and a packhouse. The Tobacco Museum exhibits traces tobacco history from Native American times to the present.
The site offers a short film, exhibits, tours, educational programs, and occasional recreational and educational events (including living history events).
The Shaker Museum is housed in a mansion overlooking Upper Shaker Lake. The museum exhibits a large collection of Shaker objects. Many are from North Union, a Shaker colony founded in 1822 and located in what is now the city of Shaker Heights. The museum also has a library with collections from both the 19th-century Shakers and 20th-century Shaker Heights. By 1850, North Union was a prosperous community of 200. At first it sold produce and handmade furniture to nearby communities. Cleveland's mass production industries eventually put them out of business. The colony disbanded in 1889.
The museum offers exhibits, tours, lectures, and research library access.
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, this park demonstrates the evolution of Florida farming from the 1850s to the mid-1940s—through three generations of the Dudley family. An authentic working farm, the homestead consists of 18 buildings, including the family farmhouse with original furnishings, an 1880s kitchen outbuilding, a general store and post office, and a functional cane syrup complex. Park staff in period clothing perform daily chores—raising crops and tending to livestock. The farm features seasonal cane grindings, corn shuckings, and heritage varieties of livestock and plants.
The park offers demonstrations, exhibits, tours, educational programs, and occasional recreational and educational events.
Native Americans feasted here, colonists built a fort, and the Smart Set of the 1920s came for vacations. A site of human occupation for over 5,000 years, Fort George Island was named for a 1736 fort built to defend the southern flank of Georgia when it was a colony. A key attraction is the recently restored Ribault Club. Once an exclusive resort, it is now a visitor center.
The park offers exhibits, tours, educational programs, and occasional recreational and educational events.