Museums 401: Washing Machines (photo diary)

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Tuesday December 09, 2025 · 7:13 PM PST

2025/12/09 · 19:13

We don’t know for sure how long humans have been wearing clothes. But we can be certain that sometime after clothing was “invented” the need to wash or clean clothes to rid them of dirt, smells, and lice became a concern. After a few thousand years of washing clothes along stream banks and lake shores, inventive humans began to play with the idea of creating machines which would clean clothes.

Ojibwa

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Tuesday December 09, 2025 · 7:13 PM PST

2025/12/09 · 19:13

The Hall of World War II in the Tillamook Air Museum in Tillamook, Oregon is a huge exhibit showing World War II in models. One exhibit shows the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Ojibwa

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Tuesday December 09, 2025 · 7:13 PM PST

2025/12/09 · 19:13

The Montana Museum of Work History in Wye, Montana is located in a store with exhibits high on the walls and hanging from the ceiling. The museum, located in the Axmen store, has exhibits featuring axes and other sharp things.

Ojibwa

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Friday December 05, 2025 · 8:24 AM PST

2025/12/05 · 08:24

Outside of the Stonehenge Air Museum in Ferndale, Montana, is a C-47 Skytrain and an F-5. The museum takes its name from the full-size replica of Stonehenge on the nearby private golf course. All of the airplanes in the museum are owned by a single individual.

Ojibwa

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Thursday December 04, 2025 · 9:01 AM PST

2025/12/04 · 09:01

The Tlingit are an Alaska Native people whose aboriginal homelands stretched along the Pacific coast for more than 400 miles. The Tlingit were 18 distinct and autonomous groups. Each group felt that it was distinct from the others and had its own unique origins and ancestry. Like other Northwest Coast First Nations, Tlingit society was traditionally characterized by social stratification, that is, there was a hierarchy of social classes.

Ojibwa

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Wednesday December 03, 2025 · 11:15 AM PST

2025/12/03 · 11:15

The Cedar Creek Grist Mill is a working museum, showing visitors the inside workings of a grist mill of late nineteenth century. The power to run the mill comes from Cedar Creek To get water into the mill there is a flume which extends 730 feet up the creek to a point where the water from the creek flows directly into the intake.

Ojibwa

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Wednesday December 03, 2025 · 7:15 AM PST

2025/12/03 · 07:15

The Portland Art Museum (PAM) in Portland, Oregon held an exhibition, Highest Heaven: Andean Art from the Elvin Duerst Bequest, featuring art from the Spanish viceregal or colonial period from 1521 until the revolutions led by Simon Bolivar in 1821.

According to PAM:

“The violent conquest of the Americas by Iberian powers, beginning the sixteenth century, did not displace the peoples of the Incan and Aztec empires. Artists and artisans applied their advanced skills to the new religion of Christianity, producing an iconography and style completely new and reflective of their ancient cultures.”

Elwin Duers (1915-2006), Oregon-born and educated, was an American foreign aid worker who spent years in Central and South America. According to his obituary in The Oregonian:

“He collected American contemporary and Spanish colonial art and did some research in the field of Spanish colonial art of the 16th to 18th centuries.”

Ojibwa

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Monday December 01, 2025 · 11:15 AM PST

2025/12/01 · 11:15

Battery A Field Artillery Horse Barn was once an officers’ horse barn. The building is one of two 1911 buildings original to Camp Withycomb. The Horse Barn now houses the artillery exhibit for the Oregon Military Museum in Clackamas, Oregon. Shown below are the exhibit’s Japanese artillery.

Ojibwa

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Monday December 01, 2025 · 7:15 AM PST

2025/12/01 · 07:15

The Polson Flathead Lake Museum in Polson, Montana, has a collection of carriages. A carriage is a horse-drawn passenger vehicle.

With regard to etymology, the word carriage entered into English in the late fourteenth century from the Old North French charriage which means “to carry in a vehicle.” It is from the Late Latin carricare which is from the Latin carrus meaning “two-wheeled wagon.” By the late fourteenth century, carriage had narrowed its meaning to “individual wheeled vehicle” and by the early eighteenth century to “horse-drawn wheeled vehicle for hauling people.”

Ojibwa

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Sunday November 30, 2025 · 11:15 AM PST

2025/11/30 · 11:15

Automobiles were first developed in Germany in the late nineteenth century. During the first decade of the twentieth century, automobile manufacturing began moving from hand-made cars to mass production and mass marketing. As with most innovations, the early automobiles relied on what had come before: carriages and wagons which had once been pulled by horses were now powered by engines.

There were a number of concerns and competing ideas at this time about how to power the new vehicles: gasoline engines or steam engines or electric motors. Borrowing from marine technology, many of the early cars were steered with a tiller while some used a steering wheel. There were also different ideas about where the driver should sit: on the right or on the left, or, in some cases, in the rear.

In 1906, fifteen states had speed limits of 20 miles per hour; nine had speed limits of 15 miles per hour; and two had speed limits of less than 10 miles per hour.

Shown below are some 1906 automobiles.

Ojibwa

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Sunday November 30, 2025 · 7:15 AM PST

2025/11/30 · 07:15

Humans—Homo sapiens—first evolved in Africa and were biologically adapted to life in a warm climate. When humans left Africa and began their migrations north into Europe and Asia, they had to adapt to a colder environment. One of the innovations that made this possible was clothing, more specifically, tailored clothing which was made to fit the human body. Tailored clothing required sewing.

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Museums 401: Washing Machines (photo diary)

Hall of World War II: Pearl Harbor (museum exhibit)

Museum of Work: Axes and other sharp things (photo diary)

Stonehenge Air Museum: C-47 and F-5 (photo diary)

Indians 101: Nobleman and Daughter (museum exhibition)

Cedar Creek Grist Mill: Inside the Mill (photo diary)

Portland Art Museum: Spanish Colonial Art (museum exhibition)

Oregon Military Museum: World War II Japanese artillery (museum exhibit)

Polson Museum: Carriages (museum exhibit)

Museums 201: 1906 automobiles (photo diary)

Museums 501: Sewing machines (photo diary)