One entire dimly-lit room of the museum is filled with a walk-through imitation paddlewheeler, with bales of cotton on its deck and a wheelhouse where disembodied wacky character voices chatter from every direction.įurther on, in the museum's Civil War gallery, a similar display depicts a Union ironclad battling a Confederate hilltop artillery post - again, dark, with voices, explosions, and a light show. Ironclad shelling the hilltop is a large, dark diorama. Two desperate river folk - white and black - pile sandbags in one display, while another features the clown shoes and fake moustaches of riverboat entertainers from the 1920s. Local celebrities such as Mark Twain and Mike Fink are faithfully reproduced, along with an assortment of gamblers, roustabouts, and other steamboat characters. It trumpets its 18 galleries and 5,000 artifacts covering 10,000 years of history, but we were impressed by its unexpected population of wax dummies. Offering relief from the Mud Island heat is the air-conditioned Mississippi River Museum. The river twists, turns, and finally empties into a large "Gulf of Mexico," where exhausted Riverwalkers can rent pedal boats shaped like swans. Adults can take off their shoes and slog their way along the entire mini-thousand miles like a striding Gulliver (each footstep equals roughly one mile). Signs repeatedly warn visitors to "walk or wade at your own risk," yet kids splash happily in their bathing suits. The river - a little stream - flows lazily south past minimalist cities and bridges rendered in steel. Every sandbar, oxbow, and topographic contour is faithfully reproduced in cement. Mud Island's main draw is Riverwalk, an outdoor, 2,000-foot-long scale model of the lower thousand miles of the Mississippi. The attraction suggests that you arrive on its monorail - a monorail - and once you disembark you find yourself in a place that seems agreeably unaltered since its opening day. The city opened Mud Island as an attraction in 1982, and has resisted the urge to change its name to something less muddy ever since. The mini-Mississippi Riverwalk on Mud Island remains open. After this Field Review was written, the Mississippi River Museum on Mud Island was closed indefinitely for repairs.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |