When we woke up in Tifton, the rain had (temporarily) stopped. When researching local attractions, we came across the Georgia Museum of Agriculture and Historic Village – right in Tifton and a 7-minute drive from the campground.
The website made it seem like a great place to learn about the early economic activity in the area – and it did not disappoint. We thought it would be busy on a Saturday. We were wrong.
Turns out their biggest crowds are Wednesday through Friday from school field trips – and on weekends, when rain was predicted like today, they are pretty deserted – at one point we speculated that they had more employees than visitors. We asked lots of questions of the various docents and experts, and they were very willing to spend as much time with us as we liked.
[Hint]
There are working versions of 1880s-1920s Turpentine stills, lumbermills, blacksmith shop, and cotton gin. Every year for one day – the first Saturday in April – they get them all working (except, perhaps, the cotton gin (reminder, “gin” is short for “engine”), which apparently has the highest likelihood of exploding with its stationary steam engine powering the massive leather belts that snake through the gin.) In fact, we suspect they have the largest collection of stationary steam engines and steam powered farm equipment around.
The Turpentine still was the most interesting, as we had seen lumbermills and cotton gins elsewhere, though our visit to the Cotton Museum did not let us go through the gin. At this museum we could walk through the entire gin building.
One of the docents – the Blacksmith – had also worked as an educator and a prison guard. When he noticed Scott’s T shirt from a Coast Guard MSST, we started talking about the Coast Guard, drones, the Strait of Hormuz, and such. Which led to the docent talking about how the prisoners smuggled stuff into the prison with drones. He asked if we had any experience with Georgia prisoners (apparently the most entertaining kind,) and seemed a bit disappointed when we explained we had not. He praised them as being the most fun to teach.
We dodged the intermittent showers and learned about eggs, peanuts, corn shuckers, products made with pine tree ingredients, period feed and seed stores, and such.
After three hours or so we declared that we had spent enough time museuming, and we went back to Khan to eat a bit more of our leftovers from Hog -n- Bones. Thus revived a bit, we thought we would drive to the other end of the campus and check out the Peanut Museum. Alas, it is only open for special events. So we hit the road.
On the way to our next campground – Cedar Break RV Park we drove by the world’s largest Peanut . We decided we could take an adequate picture from I-75, which we did.
Cedar Break is a pretty decent place – check in was fast, and the nice lady told Tom she would stop by our site with fresh baked chocolate chip cookies (which she did.) We broke out the grill and Tom cooked hot dogs, and hamburgers. Tom was disappointed to see that the hot dogs we bought yesterday had expired in June – another thing to watch at Walmart. They tasted OK, though the color was a bit off.