Manufacturing museums options: four kinds of detour that add contrast

What to take away

Add contrast, not more of the same. A second textile mill teaches less than a shipyard.
Wartime production sites are the most efficient detourindustry, labor and social change in one stop.
Extraction sites explain where the material came from, which every manufacturing trip skips.
Two hours is enough for a detour. Do not turn one into a second main stop.

Adding stops to an industrial trip is easy to do badly. The default among the manufacturing museums options is another museum of the kind you already like, which produces a pleasant afternoon and no new understanding.

The good detours supply something the main trip cannot.

Add a different workforce

Manufacturing history is usually told through machines and owners. The most efficient correction is a site where the workforce is the subject.

Wartime production is the clearest case, because the workforce changed completely and rapidly. The story of home front industry is interpreted directly at Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California, on the site of the Kaiser shipyards, and its history pages cover the shipyards, the women and migrant workers who staffed them, and the housing, childcare and health services built around the work.

Two hours there changes how you read every other plant on the trip.

Add the raw material

Manufacturing trips start at the factory gate, which skips half the system. Add an extraction site and the whole chain closes.

Mining, quarrying and timber sites are widespread, and the ones that follow the material from the ground to the finished product are the most legible. Keweenaw National Historical Park in Michigan's Copper Country runs from mine to mill to smelter, Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site in Pennsylvania pairs its iron furnace with the charcoal forest that fed it, the Pennsylvania Lumber Museum in Galeton covers the logging camps and sawmills of the timber era, and the granite quarries of Barre, Vermont, are still worked for monument stone.

The boom-and-bust versions are especially legible. The Klondike gold rush is an extreme example of an extraction economy assembled and abandoned in a few years; Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park preserves the Chilkoot Trail and the boomtown of Skagway, Alaska, with a second unit in Seattle that interprets the city that outfitted the stampeders, and the history the park interprets covers the route, the outfitting towns and the trade that grew around the stampede.

Extraction sites also explain why manufacturing towns are where they are.

Add a different era

If the trip is nineteenth century, add something modern: a working plant, a technical college workshop, a transport maintenance depot. The Ford Rouge Factory Tour in Dearborn, Michigan, walks visitors above a live assembly line, and Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton, Pennsylvania, is a steam-era rail yard whose roundhouse, turntable and locomotive shops are still worked.

If the trip is modern, add something pre-industrial: a water-powered mill, a forge, a small works run by hand. Old Slater Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, is the water-powered cotton mill of 1793, now part of Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park, and Saugus Iron Works National Historic Site in Massachusetts preserves a seventeenth-century ironworks with its water-powered forge. Seeing the same job done without power is the fastest way to understand what power changed.

Add a corridor rather than a building

Where transport shaped the industry, a canal, rail line or river corridor is a better detour than another museum, because it shows the system. The Erie Canal in New York still carries boats through its locks, and Allegheny Portage Railroad National Historic Site in Pennsylvania preserves the inclined planes that lifted canal boats over the mountains.

Drive or walk a section, look at the locks, bridges or inclines, and the geography of the whole trip snaps into focus.

How to fit detours in without wrecking the trip

How to fit detours in

Two hours maximum, including the drive off the route.
One per day, at most.
Choose one that is open on the day you pass. Volunteer sites frequently are not.
Put it in the afternoon, when the main stop is done and attention is fading anyway.

The detours to skip

Another museum of the same industry. Anything more than forty minutes off the route. Anything that requires a booking you do not already have, since the whole value of a detour is flexibility.

The four kinds of contrast above are the ones worth choosing between; more types are covered in our shortlist of picks for manufacturing museums.