About two years ago, Evergreen attorney Anthony Bishop
recommended that I visit the Fairhope Museum of History in Fairhope, Ala.
Bishop told me that he’d visited this museum with his son, and that the museum
had a number of interesting exhibits, including a number of Civil War-related
items. For this reason, I put a visit to this museum on my “bucket list” a year
or so ago.
On the afternoon of Thurs., Jan. 21, my son had a dentist
appointment in Fairhope, and I noted that the Fairhope Museum of History was
just a short distance from his dentist’s office. After his appointment, we
drove down to the museum and spent the better part of the next hour checking it
out. As it turns out, this museum was a lot better than I expected, and I’ll
never look at the Fairhope the same again.
Founded in 1992 as the Fairhope Historical Museum, today’s
Fairhope Museum of History collects and preserves artifacts from Fairhope’s
past and seeks to educate the museum’s 20,000 annual visitors on “all things
Fairhope.” The museum is currently housed in a Spanish mission-style building
that served as Fairhope City Hall from 1928 to 1972 and then as the town’s
police station and jail until 2002. It has been totally renovated to serve as a
museum and has around 5,000 square feet of exhibit space, including a spacious
exhibit area on the second floor.
The museum features a number of permanent exhibits,
including exhibits about the town’s founders, the local railroad, early
businesses, the town’s jail, past mayors, noteworthy former residents, the
Jubilee phenomenon, local writers and a fully restored 1935 Fairhope fire
truck. I especially enjoyed the museum’s exhibit dedicated to the Fairhope
Courier, the town’s local newspaper. The exhibit also included an old,
hand-operated printing press that’s about as old as anything you’ll see
anywhere else.
Fairhope is located on the shores of Mobile Bay and a
relatively short distance from the Gulf of Mexico and for this reason much of
its history is tied to the water, boating and fishing. Within the walls of the
museum, you’ll find numerous models of ships important to Fairhope’s history as
well as models of the Middle Bay Lighthouse. In addition to these, you’ll find
displays of maritime tools and equipment unlike anything I’ve seen anywhere
else.
The staff at the museum was also extremely friend and
helpful, and my son and I enjoyed what amounted to a guided tour as one of the
museum’s volunteers took us through the museum and pointed out a lot that we
would have missed if unaccompanied.
If you’d like to visit the Fairhope Museum of History and
see it for yourself, it’s located at 24 North Section St. in Fairhope. It’s
open Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and admission is free. The
museum can be reached by phone at 251-929-1471.
In the end, how many of you have visited the Fairhope Museum
of History? What did you think about it? What other museums would you recommend
visiting? Let us know in the comments section below.
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