Features
Part of Fourteen kinds of manufacturing museums are worth building a whole trip around
Manufacturing museums detours work best with one addition: a different era or workforce
The detours worth making add something the main trip lacks: a different industry, a different era, or the workforce rather than the machinery.
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 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 the Rosie the Riveter site in California, 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 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, 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.
If the trip is modern, add something pre-industrial: a water-powered mill, a forge, a small works run by hand. 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.
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 categories worth choosing between are set out in the shortlist of types, and how to judge the tours on offer applies to detours as much as to the main event.
