Winside Museum

04/23/2026

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04/10/2026

Good morning, Museum fans. Today's history story takes us back in time.

It was 150 years ago today, in 1865, that General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending the American Civil War. Union troops had driven Lee out of Richmond and blocked his route back to North Carolina. Lee’s Confederate troops had no more food or supplies, and Union forces hounded them wherever they went. Men were deserting in growing numbers, and those who stayed seemed certainly doomed. “It would be useless and therefore cruel, to provoke the further effusion of blood,” the Confederate general said, “and I have arranged to meet with General Grant with a view to surrender.”

The meeting took place in the parlor of Wilmer McLean’s house in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, and it lasted about two and a half hours. Lee was the first to arrive at one p.m., and was arrayed in full dress uniform, spotless. Grant came in half an hour later, straight from the road: rumpled and mud-speckled, with no ornamentation to give away his rank. Lee asked for the terms of the surrender in writing, which Grant did quickly. He agreed to release all Confederate soldiers currently held prisoner by the Union, with the condition that they never again take up arms against the United States. He also agreed that all the troops could keep their personal property — including their horses, which many of them would need for spring planting back home. Grant also agreed to supply Lee’s men with Union rations. The meeting concluded at about four o’clock and — for all intents and purposes — so did the war, which had cost some 630,000 American lives. There were further surrenders of other field armies over the next few months, but Lee’s surrender marked the death knell of the Confederate cause.

Grant, upon overhearing some Union soldiers celebrating, put a stop to the festivities, saying, “The war is over; the Rebels are our countrymen again, and the best sign of rejoicing after the victory will be to abstain from all demonstrations in the field.”

03/17/2026

Happy St. Paddy's Day Museum Fans. Here's a bit of history of this day from the Writer's Almanac.

Today is St. Patrick’s Day, the annual feast day celebrating a patron saint of Ireland.

St. Patrick was born around the year 385, in a village in Wales. When he was 16, a group of Irish pirates raided his village and took many of the young men back to Ireland to work as slaves. Patrick worked for six years as a herdsman in the Irish countryside. In his sixth year, he escaped and made his way back to Wales. But, according to his autobiography, soon after he got back home, he heard a voice telling him to go back to Ireland and convert the Irish to Christianity. That’s eventually what he did, but first he went to France to visit monasteries and study religious texts. After 12 years in France, he went back to Ireland, where he founded monasteries, schools, and churches and converted much of the island to Christianity.

Parades are a large part of the day’s celebrations, and New York City’s is the largest in the world, with the 69th Infantry Regiment leading 150,000 marchers up Fifth Avenue.

The marchers will include firefighters, police officers, emigrant societies, New York politicians, high school bands, and community service organizations. The first St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York was on March 17, 1762. Boston has been celebrating St. Patrick’s Day since 1737. And since 1961, Chicago has been dyeing its river green for the holiday.

The city of Dublin is a relative newcomer to the huge parade festivities, but the celebration there has been taking off in recent years. Dublin’s first St. Patrick’s Day Festival was held in 1995 to boost tourism. Since then, the parade has grown into a weeklong event that includes a symposium with lectures on Ireland’s economic success, issues of Irish identity, and the future of the Irish state. About 500,000 people turn out to witness the Dublin parade.

01/15/2026

Greetings Museum fans. Today's post from the Writer's Almanac looks back in time.

On this date in 1943, Franklin Roosevelt completed the first airplane journey by a sitting president. He needed to get to the Casablanca Conference in Morocco to discuss strategy with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. German U-boats were making sea travel too perilous, so his advisors agreed — somewhat reluctantly — that air travel was the best option. Roosevelt left Florida in a Boeing 314 Flying Boat. Nicknamed the Dixie Clipper, the 314 was a commercial, rather than a military, seaplane, and it was fitted out comfortably with beds and a lounge area.

They departed from Florida, and the journey took four days, due to frequent refueling stops. They flew from Trinidad to Brazil, then across the Atlantic to Gambia, and then on to Morocco. Roosevelt, 60 years old and somewhat frail, suffered some from the high altitude, and had to be given oxygen, but he was in good spirits. He celebrated his 61st birthday on the return journey, enjoying a birthday luncheon over Haiti.

11/09/2025

Happy Veteran's Day to all that serve and have served. Today's post in The Writer's Almanac is one of the reasons my dad and thousands like him fought in WWII. The world divided into allies to fight oppression versus those who sought to conquer other's land and kill their people.

November 9th is the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night in 1938 when German N***s coordinated a nationwide attack on Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues. More than 1,000 synagogues were burned or destroyed. Rioters looted about 7,500 Jewish businesses and vandalized Jewish hospitals, homes, schools, and cemeteries. Before that night, the N***s had killed people secretly and individually. After Kristallnacht, the N***s felt free to persecute the Jews openly, because they knew no one would stop them.

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10/17/2025

Thank you, Winside community, for coming to the Museum's spaghetti dinner and supporting the Museum.

10/11/2025

Winside Museum is sponsoring a spaghetti dinner Sunday, October 12, 2025, in an effort to raise funds to build a temperature-controlled building across from the Museum where the old hotel stood. Come see a drawing of the proposed building!

The meal will be served from 11:00 - 1:00 in the Winside Auditorium. Take-out is an option. The public is invited. Photos are from a past dinner.

11/28/2024

Happy Thanksgiving Museum Fans. Today's post is a bit of history about this holiday.
Today is Thanksgiving Day. Although the Thanksgiving festivities celebrated by the Pilgrims and a tribe of Wampanoag Indians happened in 1621, it wasn't until 1789 that the newly sworn-in President George Washington declared, in his first presidential proclamation, a day of national "thanksgiving and prayer" for that November.

The holiday fell out of custom, though, and by the mid 1800s only a handful of states officially celebrated Thanksgiving, on a date of their choice. It was the editor of a women's magazine, Sarah Josepha Hale, a widow and the author of the poem "Mary Had a Little Lamb," who campaigned for a return of the holiday. For 36 years, she wrote articles about the Plymouth colonists in her magazine, trying to revive interest in the subject, and editorials suggesting a national holiday. Hale wrote to four presidents about her idea — Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan — before her fifth letter got notice. In 1863, exactly 74 years after Washington had made his proclamation, President Lincoln issued his own, asking that citizens "in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise." He requested prayers especially for those widowed and orphaned by the ongoing Civil War, as well as gratitude for "fruitful fields," enlarging borders of settlements, abundant mines, and a burgeoning population. From the Writer's Almanac.

08/20/2024

Museum Fans: Recent history still making history.

It was on this day in 1977 that Voyager 2 was launched by NASA to explore the planets of our solar system and to take the first up-close photographs of the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

Just before the Voyagers took off, a committee of scientists, led by Carl Sagan, decided to put on board each Voyager a message from Earth in case extraterrestrials ever found them. At the time, the Cold War was at its height, and some members of the committee considered that these spacecraft and their contents might be the last traces of the human race left in the universe after a nuclear war. The Voyagers were each equipped with a gold-plated phonograph containing a variety of earthly sounds, including a heartbeat, a mother's kiss, wind, rain, surf, a chimpanzee, footsteps, laughter, the music of Bach and Mozart, and the Chuck Berry song "Johnny Be Good." Carl Sagan said, "The launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet."

Today, the Voyagers have traveled farther from Earth than any other human-made objects in history. Both have gone well beyond Pluto, the farthest planet from the sun. Voyager 2, which launched on this day in 1977, is currently approaching the outer limits of our solar system, headed toward Sirius, the brightest star in the sky.

It was on this day in 1977 that Voyager 2 was launched by NASA to explore the planets of our solar system and to take the first up-close photographs of the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

Just before the Voyagers took off, a committee of scientists, led by Carl Sagan, decided to put on board each Voyager a message from Earth in case extraterrestrials ever found them. At the time, the Cold War was at its height, and some members of the committee considered that these spacecraft and their contents might be the last traces of the human race left in the universe after a nuclear war. The Voyagers were each equipped with a gold-plated phonograph containing a variety of earthly sounds, including a heartbeat, a mother's kiss, wind, rain, surf, a chimpanzee, footsteps, laughter, the music of Bach and Mozart, and the Chuck Berry song "Johnny Be Good." Carl Sagan said, "The launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet."

Today, the Voyagers have traveled farther from Earth than any other human-made objects in history. Both have gone well beyond Pluto, the farthest planet from the sun. Voyager 2, which launched on this day in 1977, is currently approaching the outer limits of our solar system, headed toward Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. From the Writer's Almanac.

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08/12/2024

Drawings of the first sewing machine

08/12/2024

Good morning, Museum fans
Here's a bit of history about an invention that changed our lives.

On this date in 1851, Isaac Merritt Singer patented his first commercial sewing machine. Elias Howe had first gotten the American patent for his machine in 1846. Singer had improved on the design and made it much more practical and efficient. His was the first to use an up-and-down needle movement that was powered by a foot treadle, but his machine used a lockstitch pattern that Howe had patented, so Howe sued him for infringement. Singer lost, and had to pay royalties to Howe. Because Singer had figured out how to mass-produce the sewing machine, he made Howe a rich man from the royalty payments alone. A few years later, Singer began marketing a machine for home use. Realizing that it would probably be too costly for the average housewife, he also pioneered something that would dramatically change American consumer practices: buying on credit and making installment payments.

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