2024-- major new exhibits coming
HATS! HATS! HATS!
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There was a time when no self-respecting man or woman would leave the house without a hat on their head-- how times have changed!
See the changing fashions of headgear through the decades. Maybe you'll see something that used to cover your head!
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COLOR MY HISTORY
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With a little help from AI, we've added color to some of the most interesting photos in the museum collection. It really makes them come alive-- come see for yourself!
WORLD WAR II
From the jungles of Burma to the beaches of Normandy to liberating Nazi concentration camps, local men and women served with distinction in World War II. Learn their stories and how the area responded on the home front. By the way--
one local WW II vet is still alive!
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CAMERAS/PHOTOGRAPHERS
See one of the oldest cameras ever to depict life in the Three Oaks area (it's that one at right), a camera operated by one of the first female photographers in SW Michigan.
See home movies shot all around the Three Oaks area-- Galien at work in the 1950s, a seaplane carrying vacationers to Lakeside, basketball heroes returning to New Buffalo, and 1960s beauty queens touring area towns.
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MICHIANA SUMMER CAMPS
Summer camps sprung up along the Southwest Michigan shore in the early 1900s, part of a nationwide music to get children out of crowded, dirty cities and into fresh air. There was a Union Pier camp that recruited from the synagogues of Chicago and Detroit, a camp for YWCA girls from Chicago, a camp dedicated to teaching Czech children gymnastics, and a camp-- started by the Warren family of Three Oaks-- that is now celebrating its hundredth anniversary.​
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WATERS WARREN'S BEEHIVE
Rev. Waters Warren, the father of the most famous inventors in local history, had an inventive streak of his own. He patented a new-fangled beehive in 1863, well before his son Fred produced a mechanical calculator that was decades ahead of its time and well before his son Edward came up with Featherbone, the whalebone substitute that brought prosperity to the Three Oaks area and great wealth to the Warren family.​
The beehive is on loan to our museum from the Michigan State Museum-- come check it out!
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