By SHERRI SMITH BROWN

Georgia > West Central Georgia > Troup County > LaGrange

At the Explorations in Antiquity Center, you can experience the food and drink common to the culture of the ancient Middle East at an authentic Passover meal.

Want to do a little archaeological digging around – Indiana Jones style? How about with a real-live Indiana Jones type teacher, showing you authentic archaeological techniques, step-by-step? If this sounds like an exciting way to spend a day, Explorations in Antiquity Center in LaGrange might just prove to be an adventurous and educational destination for you and your family.

Explorations in Antiquity Center is a museum with full-scale archaeological reconstructions of discoveries from the ancient world. This museum shakes off the dust of history and presents it to all ages in unique and unforgettable ways.

You will find four separate Kid’s Dig pits. One, geared to very young explorers, contains dinosaur remains and other fossils. The other three are for older kids and are based on archaeological excavations of actual sites, ranging in time from the 15th century BCE to the second century CE. Real artifacts and replicas—things like coins, pottery shards, oil lamps, ancient fishing equipment, a stone anchor, mosaics and carved stones—are buried in the sand of these pits. One pit, centered in the early Roman era, is for elementary students. A bi-level Iron Age pit is for middle schoolers. The last, which has three strata ranging from late Roman to Byzantine periods, is geared toward high school students.

The Explorations in Antiquity Center is not just for kids, though—it is for people of all ages, customs and faiths who are interested in seeing the lives and practices of ancient peoples brought into fresh interpretation. You can visit a Time Tunnel, where you will learn about ancient worship practices, ranging from Canaanite paganism to Byzantine Christianity and covering a period of roughly 3,000 years. The Garden Walk features Middle Eastern plants, such as 200-year-old olive trees. You will also see authentic Bedouin goat-hair tents and numerous re-creations: pagan and Jewish altars, an olive press, a first-century residence and tomb, a threshing floor, and an area depicting the brutal Roman method of execution, crucifixion.

You can try your hand at bread making in the fashion Middle Eastern shepherds have employed for thousands of years. You also can dine as ancient Israelis did with a recreated Passover meal, featuring skewered and roasted chicken; unleavened bread; nuts; olives; sun-dried fruits; “bitter herbs,” such as radish, parsley and onion; several Middle Eastern dips; wine and water.

Explorations in Antiquity Center is a one-of-a-kind museum and a great destination for everyone.

Links:

• Read more about Explorations in Antiquity Center.
• Read more about other travel and recreation resources in and around LaGrange.

By SHERRI SMITH BROWN

Georgia > Northwest Georgia Mountains > Bartow County > Cartersville

Amazing stone effigies found during excavation at the Etowah Indian Mounds are on display in the historic site’s museum. 

There are several places in Georgia where you can explore Native American Indian Mounds, but Etowah Indian Mounds Historic Site in Bartow County is one of the most interesting.

This is the most intact Mississippian Culture site in the Southeastern United States. From about 1000 A.D. to 1550 A.D., it was home to several thousand Indians. There are six earthen mounds, which were used for a variety of purposes: platforms for buildings, stages for ceremonial events, and cemeteries for the community’s elite. There is also a village area, a plaza, borrow pits, and a defensive ditch on the 54-acre site.

Only nine percent of this site has been excavated, but that excavation has been astounding in the artifacts that have been discovered and what they have revealed about the people who once lived here. Over the years, excavations have unearthed thousands of artifacts, including feathered headdresses, ceremonial axes, pipes and copper plates. The Museum at the site is well worth the trip. There are well-preserved stone effigies and objects made of shells, stone and wood among many other artifacts. (more…)

By SHERRI SMITH BROWN

Georgia > East Central Georgia > Richmond County > Augusta

“Back Porches, Macon, Georgia, 1948″ is one of the paintings currently hanging in the Emil Holzhauer: The Georgia Years exhibition at the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta. 

For those who appreciate American Southern art – from the student to the aficionado – the Morris Museum of Art holds wonders. It is the first museum dedicated to the art and artists of the American South. The museum houses a permanent collection of nearly 5,000 pieces consisting of 200 years of Southern American paintings, including antebellum art, Civil War art, African-American art, early Southern 20th century paintings and contemporary works.

The Morris Museum of Art, located on downtown Augusta’s Riverwalk, hosts eight to ten special exhibitions every year. Exhibits for the remainder of this year include:

• Emil Holzhauer: The Georgia Years, August 29 – November 29, 2009
• William Christenberry: Photographs, 1961 – 2005, September 12 – November 8, 2009
• Response and Memory: The Art of Beverly Buchanan, November 21 – January 31, 2010
• Deep Sea: Drawings by William Golding, December 12 – March 14, 2010
• Regional Dialect: American Scene Paintings from the John and Susan Horseman Collection, March 6 – May 30, 2010

Read more about Museums in Georgia, Augusta, and Richmond County, or find other activities in the East Central Georgia Travel Region here at Brown’s Guides.

By SHERRI SMITH BROWN

Georgia > East Central Georgia > Richmond County > Augusta

28th President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson’s boyhood home in Augusta in a National Historic Landmark and open for tours. 

Woodrow Wilson said, “My earliest recollection is of standing at my father’s gateway in Augusta, Georgia, when I was four years old and hearing someone pass and say that Mr. Lincoln was elected and there was to be war.” Later, in 1865, Wilson would watch as Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America, was led through the streets of Augusta in chains on his way to prison at Fortress Monroe.

The Boyhood Home of President Woodrow Wilson was the place where he would spend the formative years of his childhood, years that would affect him for the rest of his life. Woodrow “Tommy” Wilson was one year old when he moved to Augusta when his father, Joseph Wilson, became pastor of Augusta’s First Presbyterian Church and three years old when he moved into the 14-room Presbyterian Manse, residing there with his family until 1870. While living in Augusta, Wilson experienced the hardships of the Civil War and Reconstruction. He also began his education, tasted leadership as president of the Lightfoot Baseball Club, and grounded his deep Presbyterian faith.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated as the 28th President of the United States on March 4, 1913. His two-term administration was among the most notable in U.S. history. In 1917, during his second term, the United States entered World War I, and Wilson played an international role in the negotiation of the Treaty of Versailles and the organization of the League of Nations. (more…)

By SHERRI SMITH BROWN

Georgia > Atlanta Metro > Fulton County > Atlanta

The 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta is the subject of just one of the many historical exhibits you will see at the Atlanta History Center. 

The Atlanta History Center, one of the largest history museums in the nation, is a place you can visit time and time again and always have a different experience. If you are interested in the Civil War, there is “Turning Point: The American Civil War,” one of the nation’s largest and most complete Civil War exhibitions with over 1,500 Union and Confederate artifacts, including the flag that flew over Atlanta at the time of its surrender and a Union supply wagon used by Sherman’s army.

“Metropolitan Frontiers” is the largest and most comprehensive exploration of urban history in the Southeast, telling the story of Atlanta’s emergence as a major city after the Civil War. Vintage film footage documents the 1939 premiere of Gone With the Wind, and the city’s primary role in the Civil Rights Movement.

The Centennial Olympic Games Museum at the Atlanta History Center guides you through the history of the Olympic movement, shows highlights from the Games on a large screen, and has America’s only complete collection of Olympic torches and medals. (more…)

By SHERRI SMITH BROWN

Georgia > East Central Georgia > Wilkes County > Washington

This late 18th-century log cabin represents the home of Job Callaway and is one of several historical buildings that you can see at Callaway Plantation in Washington. 

As late as the early 1770s, Georgia’s boundaries were mostly within the coastal region. In only a confined area beyond Augusta were the Piedmont’s heavier soils and hardwood forests included within Georgia’s boundary. Frontiersmen were trickling down into this area from their homes in Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas. Self-reliant, with few slaves and little love for coastal aristocrats, they brought a new way of life centered around the cultivation of tobacco and corn.

As the population grew, Georgia needed more of this Piedmont land — land inhabited by the Creek and Cherokee Indians. In 1773, Georgia’s Royal Governor, James Wright, purchased two tracts of land from the Cherokees and Creeks; one strip of coastal plain, stretching between the Ogeechee and Altamaha rivers, which made way for the cultivation of rice; the other on the Piedmont, stretching north to Hart County on the Savannah River and almost to Athens on the west. Out of these Piedmont “ceded lands,” Wilkes County was formed along with the first Constitution of Georgia in 1777.

Settlers flooded into the new area via the Piedmont route from the north. Most of these families were non-slaveholders who took farm-size tracts of 200 acres or less, thus blending well with the tobacco and corn growing frontiersmen who had preceded them into the Piedmont a few years earlier. (more…)

By SHERRI SMITH BROWN

Georgia > Northeast Georgia Mountains > Hall County > Gainesville

Located to the Northeast Georgia History Center, the cabin where Cherokee Chief White Path was born and raised pays tribute to an Indian leader who was betrayed by his friend, President Andrew Jackson. 

The history of Native Americans who once roamed the rolling piedmont of Georgia is one that ends sorrowfully. One story that only adds to the poignancy is that of Cherokee Indian Chief White Path. White Path was born in 1761 near present day Ellijay and grew up in a cabin. His Cherokee name, Nunna-tsune-ga, translates literally as “I dwell on the peaceful (or white) path.”

In 1814, White Path joined General Andrew Jackson to fight the Creek Indians at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in Alabama. It is said that White Path and Chief John Ross swam across the Tallapoosa River and stole the Creek canoes prior to the battle, cutting off their escape by water, and ensuring a victory for Andrew Jackson.

Over the next two decades, White Path, who was a skillful orator, protested the influence of white settlers and spoke out against it in fiery oratory at the Cherokee capitol of New Echota. A strict follower of the traditional ways, he railed against the new Cherokee constitution as well as the introduction of Christianity by the missionaries. Eventually, he had to yield to the new ways. His new focus became fighting the removal policies of his old comrade and now president, Andrew Jackson. (more…)

By SHERRI SMITH BROWN

Georgia > Atlanta Metro > Fulton County > Atlanta

This 1953 painting, “Celestial Gate” by prominent African-American artist Hale Woodruff, is part of the permanent collection at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art. 

The Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, located in the Camille Olivia Hanks Cosby Academic Center at Spelman College in Atlanta, has a 4,500-square foot exhibition area that displays an impressive collection of art, ranging from painting and sculpture to prints and textiles. It is the only museum in the nation that emphasizes works by and about women of the African Diaspora in its collections, exhibitions and programs.

The museum’s permanent collection contains 20^th century paintings and sculptures by African American artists. Particularly significant are the works by Hale Woodruff, the prominent painter, printmaker and teacher who taught at Spelman College and established the art department at the Atlanta University Center in 1931. The permanent collection at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art also comprises extensive African holdings, with a strong emphasis on the art of central Africa. (more…)

By SHERRI SMITH BROWN

Georgia > Coastal Georgia > Camden County > St. Marys

Learn about the history of Dungeness, (pictured above) the home of Thomas and Lucy Carnegie on Cumberland Island, at the Cumberland Island National Seashore Museum in St. Marys.

Cumberland Island – one of Georgia’s beautiful barrier islands and a designated national seashore – is a 45-minute ferry ride from St. Marys on the Georgia coast. Before making the trip to Cumberland, plan to visit the Cumberland Island National Seashore Museum in St. Marys to learn about the island’s history, which includes history about the Native Americans, African Americans, and white Americans who have inhabited it.

There are exhibits on the Timucua, which refers to all the Native Americans in Southeastern Georgia and Northeastern Florida who spoke the Timucua language. The story is also told of Revolutionary War hero General Nathaniel Greene and his wife Catherine, who settled on Cumberland and built a home, the first Dungeness. You will also see exhibits at the Cumberland Island National Seashore Museum about the African American slaves who worked the extensive cotton plantations on the island in the early 1800s. In the 1890s after emancipation, The Settlement was established for African American workers on the island. The First African Baptist Church was established in 1893 and then rebuilt in the 1930s. (more…)

By SHERRI SMITH BROWN

Georgia > East Central Georgia > Richmond County > Augusta

Learning about science and technology is an adventure at National Science Center’s Fort Discovery. 

The National Science Center’s Fort Discovery in Augusta is an incredible exploration of science and technology that the entire family will enjoy.

Your visit begins at Riverfront Plaza and Balcony. From there, you can tour Martian Towers, a 22-foot tall, space-themed climbing structure that features numerous climbing and interactive play areas throughout its multiple levels. The Knox Gallery showcases traveling exhibits, special presentation and programs. In the Math, Motion and Momentum Gallery, you’ll experience the science of motion and have fun with numbers and mathematical probability. In the Power Generation Gallery, you’ll discover the many different ways by which electrical energy can be produced: wind, heat, chemical, solar, free fall weight, and matter. Explore the science of everyday living as you experiment with thermostats, alarms and other sensors in the Everyday Technologies Gallery; and interact with machines that use a variety of technologies to accomplish difficult or unusual tasks in the Robotics Gallery. (more…)