Holland Land Office Museum

The Holland Land Office Museum announced on its blog yesterday that on June 13, it will begin an "online exhibit" series of 25 things that made Genesee County famous.

For this online exhibit, a panel of 15 people spent six months sifting through 100s of things know world wide. It was the panel's job to come up with a list of 25 things that made Genesee County famous. Every week, until November 28, 2008 the Holland Land Office Museum will release another item.

Cool idea, and it's interesting that this physical museum has chosen the digital world to highlight such a potentially fascinating list of events, people and items.

Anybody want to guess what some of these 25 things might be?  Leave a comment.  (I'm guessing #1 is anti-masonry and the Morgan Affair. Joseph Mancuso and the business incubator have to be pretty high up there, too.)

This morning, Pat Weissend was kind enough to show me some of what they've got over at the Holland Land Office Museum, where he serves as the director. I took a video camera and we stepped out onto the cold stone floor of the wood-walled museum addition that houses the 14-foot gibbet — a variation on the gallows. He tells me that the hangman's noose is the most popular artifact at the museum — no surprise, I guess, when you consider the morbid curiosity of children big and small.

This video will be the first in a (hopefully) long series of discovery-style episodes over at the museum, where they have thousands of other artifacts to scope and get the story on. So be sure to tune in regularly and keep an eye out for those. We'll try and get a new one up every couple weeks or so. In the meantime, and without further ado, The Batavian presents: The Hangman's Noose.

Visit the museum's Web site for more information, and to access links to Pat's podcasts on history. Or just head over to 131 W. Main St. and check out the collection.

Finally paid a visit to the Holland Land Office Museum on Main Street this afternoon. Ron Pinney was kind enough to take me around and show me some of the artifacts they've got on display there. He told me about the corkscrew as big as a cat that the colonials used to unplug lumps of dried fruit from a barrel. He showed me the dentist chair and the rusty metal tooth-yanker that made us both wince. 

Pat Weissend came out and introduced himself, too. He's the museum's director, and a bit of an online experimenter himself. He has been filing podcasts all about the museum and its goodies for some time now. There's one about the infamous anti-Mason William Morgan. Another about the Seneca Chief Red Jacket. Even a quick three-minute episode called: "Where did the name Batavia come from?" Check it out if you want to find out.

Tune into The Batavian next Friday for a video tour of the Holland Land Office Museum, led by Pat Weissend. In the meantime, here are a few photographs I snapped while I was there today. Maybe you can figure out what they are.