Milton Hershey opened his first business selling confectionary, fruits and nuts in Philadelphia when he was 18, coinciding with the 1876 Centennial Exposition. However, he didn’t see success and went bankrupt in 1882 after his father joined his business and then left him to pay the bills. He finally got Read more
Right in the state capitol complex in Charleston is a cultural centre with a museum underground. It’s a noisy museum with audio playing in every gallery interpreting state history. The audio overlaps in the corridors. It’s also a very southern museum. European invaders who duped the natives out of their Read more
All car museums are laid out the same way, I’ve been to enough of them to know. There’s always a big entranceway with a two-tiered display of a couple of dozen cars angled toward the visitor. The whole thing started when the depression-era bootleggers needed to run from the law. Read more
This free-admission museum in uptown Charlotte only features temporary exhibitions. It focuses on post-Civil War racial justice issues to the modern day. The exhibition I saw was on climates of inequality about how climate change disproportionately affects poorer people and racial minorities. The government forced racial segregation by redlining zones Read more
Harvey Bernard Gantt was the first black student at Clemson University, the first black mayor of Charlotte where this center is and became an architect after completing a graduate degree at MIT. The center has three temporary exhibits that rotate out about every three months. Nearly all the works are Read more
It’s the only museum worth visiting in Greensboro is pretty good. The third floor has an exhibit on the relationship between freedom and democracy, with a focus on the Civil Rights Movement. It also has a mock-up town square with historical buildings around it showing how people lived during Taft’s Read more
It’s a small museum in Mount Airy, NC about actor Andrew Griffith’s life. He grew up in the town and filmed the Andy Griffith Show here, which is where Mayberry is based on. It’s mostly on the Andy Griffith Show with the original courthouse signs, desk, and clothes, but there Read more
I like to imagine this is what the children of Mayberry, like Opie, would have learned. They would’ve learned about hunters on horseback, early settlers coming by wagon train and 18th-century wars. The museum spans three floors of the building with a model railroad in the back room. The railroad Read more
The museum in North Carolina’s state capital occupies the ground floor of the city’s first high-rise building. There’s a lot on black history such as black businesses of the 19th century, how the oldest black university—Shaw University—was founded by Dr. Tupper in 1870, and racial exclusion in American politics. There Read more
This museum in Raleigh is deceptively large. There are four floors of exhibits across two buildings and a decent visit will take over an hour. I didn’t have that kind of time so I’ll just give you the highlights. The top floor is the cafe and Arthropod Zoo, so sea Read more