Vermin Vie for Visitor Votes

The stories that National Park museum collections tell!


In honor of the 100th anniversary of museums in the National Park Service, Lincoln Home National Historic Site used one of the celebration suggestions from the museum centennial web page and created a "Vote for Your Favorite Artifact" exhibit in its visitor center. Park staff was asked to choose their top 5 artifacts from a suggested list of about 30. The top 15 vote getters were then featured in an exhibit installed on June 28. Visitors are asked to vote on their favorites with the results posted weekly as part of the exhibit. Curator Susan M. Haake reports that while Lincoln's lap desk has been the most popular among staff, visitors "far and away" favor a display of mice found in the Lincoln Home ceiling during the 1987-88 restoration. She also notes that the mice may have been interested in keeping up with current events having fashioned their nest out of a mid-1870s newspaper! The exhibit will be up until Labor Day.


(NPS Photo/Susan M. Haake)