Summer vacation, part 7: history on the way home

We included more sight-seeing on the final days of our trip.   

 Monday, July 30:  The Oneida Community was founded by John Humphrey Noyes in the 1840's. Noyes was a "perfectionist," saying that individuals could choose not to sin, and thus achieve holiness in life. He and his followers were evicted from Putney, Vermont, and settled in Oneida, New York.  Community members practiced gender equality to the extent that children belonged to all adults. They practiced selective reproduction. (They had "amative" and "procreative" relations.)  An early and very successful industry was manufacturing animal traps.  The community disbanded as a religious entity in 1881. The successor Oneida Corp. began making silver plate which is what Oneida is known for today.

Mansion House is 93,000 square feet. It's part museum, part lodging, and part apartments.

I was very intrigued by Community member Jessie Kinsley's braided art.  She drew the design on paper. She cut fabric (mostly silk) into thin strips and braided it, then glued the braids to make the design.

There was a wonderful album quilt awkwardly hung opposite a staircase.  It is  documented here.

















I-90 pretty much follows the Erie Canal across New York. Our next stop was the Erie Canal Museum in downtown Syracuse. The museum includes the last remaining weighlock building where barges and cargo were weighed and tolls assessed accordingly.  The exhibits provide the historical and commercial context of the canal. It truly did open up the country, allowing crops and resources from the west to reach the east and allowing people and manfactured goods to go west.  Towns sprung up along the canal route.

The original canal was replaced in 1918 by a larger, deeper barge canal.  Railroad and now the highways have supplanted the canal for major transport.


Tuesday, July 31:  When we stopped at the Pennsylvania Welcome Center off I-90 about 8:30 a.m. I picked up a brochure advertising a boat tour around Presque Isle State Park in Erie, PA.  The first tour of the day was 11:00 a.m.  Well, why not?
 Presque Isle is French for peninsula ("almost an island").  The park was created in 1912 and has 3,200 acres. There are several public beaches, a picnic pavilions, and campsites. The Tom Ridge Environmental Center is a new building that highlights the ecology of the park and Lake Erie. (Unfortunately we did not have enough time to tour the entire facility).   The park's historic significance goes back to the War of 1812. Admiral Perry's fleet sailed from PI to defeat the British Navy in the Battle of Lake Erie.  (We learned about that on our 2005 Road Scholar trip to South Bass Island at the western side of the lake.)   The 90-minute boat trip was informative and delightful.

Perry Monument

Presque Isle Light House 

And with that we concluded our touring.  It was pedal to the metal from then on -- after the last night outside Toledo, we got an early start and pulled into our driveway just before noon on Wednesday.   Home again!