Mineral County Museum Hawthorne, NV & Grant's Great News

Our day started with good news from Larry Jr.  If you have read the blog for the last couple months you may remember that our grandson Grant wrote a short story composition that was an assignment from the school he attends.  It is an international school and more than 4,000 entries from students all over the world were judged.  Grant was the first place finisher from all the schools and was notified of his super accomplishment.  His story made the published copy of the book and as a reward he is the recipient of 6 copies.  We've been promised a signed copy of one of the books.  

Congratulations go out to Grant for his accomplishment and we are very proud grandparents of our budding author.

Gerry and I decided to do a little geocaching and explore around the area.  I had downloaded some geocaches in the area and we set out to find them and called it a day after 7 finds.  That put us at 1403 geocache finds since we started a few years ago.  

Then we stopped at the Mineral County Museum to check it out.  What a find!  It isn't that large but it was one of the more impressive small town museums we have ever run across in our travels.

We were the only two people touring the museum and found a number of items that we remembered from when we were children.  Gerry's father was a coal miner and she remembers him coming home with his lunch pail and carbide lamp.  My father always had a few of them and we used them when we went fishing at night. 

The item below is a belt driven stone crusher used in local silver and gold mines.  It had three steel shafts that rotated on a camshaft and crushed the rocks as they went under the bottom part.  It was about 8-9 ft tall and made out of wood and steel.

These two greeted us as we entered the museum and were quite large also.  Very patriotic view of the eagle and the flags.

Below is an example of silver ore that was mined in the area.  They don't mine silver now due to the high production costs, but there are still a few small goldmines being worked.

Gerry helped the switchboard operator many years ago and it looked much like this one.  Now we have cell phones and direct lines to whomever, whenever we want to talk.  

Gerry's family had a radio similar to this one and her parents willed it to our son Larry Jr.   He proudly displays it in his home.

 These are two utensils that Gerry used when she was much younger to wash clothes.  Now people use them as musical instruments.  I guess that is progress.

 

The pincushion girl below was another item from her past.  Her mother had one just like this one.

My father collected carnival glass and never missed the chance to buy some at estate sales.  I still have a few pieces from him in storage.

I chatted with the two lady volunteers in the museum while Gerry finished checking out the place.  They knew a lot about the history of Hawthorne and were very friendly and outgoing.  One lady was a genealogist.  She had written a book on the cemeteries in the area and proudly showed me the book.  It was very well done and she has sold a number of copies.

After we left the museum we headed for the Ordnance Museum, however it was closed.  We did take the time to take a photo of this guy who was standing out front.

 A few miles down the road is Walker Lake that is very large.  We only drove down the lakeshore a few miles and turned around.  It is on our exit route out of here and we look forward to seeing more of it.

At one end of the lake there was a large pasture with many horses enjoying fresh grown grass.  I don't know who owns the horses but I would guess it is some local rancher who uses the government land.
 

Maggie's Once More restaurant was our choice for dinner.  The meals were huge.  The leftovers will provide us with lunch on Monday.  Gerry had the chicken fried steak and I had a fried chicken dinner with a baked potato.  By then we were both tired out and decided to head back to the motor home and take it easy. 

That was our day, how was yours?