There’s so much to see and do in the US! You can find something of interest for everyone, and really do just about anything.
We all know about the stuff everyone visits when they go to a certain state. Here in NYC, visitors hit the Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, Central Park, and maybe a Broadway show. Yeah, it’s cool, but everyone does that stuff when they come here.
We’re going to shed light on some offbeat and often weird sightseeing spots for you to brag about on social media. We’ll give you three places. You get to look up more on your own.
So, here is your official Jammany Hall guide to offbeat travel destinations to three sites in all 50 states. The series has been organized by region, so you can visit a bunch of these during the same road trip:
- Northeast: (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont)
- Mid-Atlantic: (Delaware, Maryland, Washington DC, West Virginia, and Virginia)
- Southeast: (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee)
- Midwest: (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin)
- Southwest: (Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas)
- Western: (California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, and Utah)
- Northwest: (Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Washington, and Wyoming)
Connecticut
Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry – Storrs, Connecticut
(www.bimp.uconn.edu)
OK, I’m guessing that there are more than a few of you out there who are closet puppet lovers. I know you’re out there!
Puppets have played an important part in storytelling across most cultures throughout history. They can be easily dressed and made to perform feats like flying before the age of special effects.
In a way, puppets were early cartoon characters and could do anything the puppeteer demanded to fit the story. Fly, fight, whatever. Audiences loved the stories that puppeteers told, and puppet shows were immensely popular back in the day.
As you’ve probably noticed, puppet theater isn’t as popular as it once was (SAY WHAT?) because of TV and movies. Not to mention Fortnite.
Here’s where the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut steps in to save this almost forgotten art.
The Ballard Institute was named for artist and puppeteer Frank Ballard with the goal of celebrating his art.
The Institute has displays of puppets from around the world, and you can see just how widespread puppetry has been over the history of humankind.
They also host performances and offer puppet making workshops.
Check their website to find schedules for performances and workshops.
Cushing Brain Collection – New Haven, Connecticut
(www. library.medicine.yale.edu/cushingcenter)
My zombie readers will love this place if they need a snack during their road trip!
Dr Harvey Cushing was a renowned early 20th century surgeon who spent much of his medical career focused on the brain. Oh, and by the way, the guy was also a Pulitzer Prize winner…
His work helped to pioneer modern brain surgery techniques to treat brain disease and tumors.
Upon Cushing’s death, his extensive brain sample collection ended up at Yale University where it was placed in the basement. The collection was little known except to a few students and professors until 2010 when it was displayed for public view.
Come spend the day with several hundred diseased brains and try not to drool. Oh, that was meant for my zombie readers! Sorry…
Mystic Pizza – Groton, Connecticut
I spent a couple of nights in Mystic last year so I could fully indulge my nerdhood by covering every square inch of Mystic Seaport (It’s awesome. Check it out!). By lunchtime on the second day, my belly was telling me to find some pizza.
As a New Yorker, I need good pizza to support life functions.
So, I decided a quick ride to Mystic Pizza might do as a temporary fix.
Perhaps you remember the movie, “Mystic Pizza” (1988) which basically launched the careers of Julia Roberts, Vincent D’Onofrio, and some dude named Matt Damon.
The movie’s screenwriter, Amy Jones, had used the restaurant as a backdrop for her movie after having vacationed in Mystic, and she decided to use the pizzeria as the focal location.
The pizzeria opened in the early 70s as a cool neighborhood joint. Just another family place where you could come and have some good food and see familiar faces.
That is until Hollywood rolled into town.
The owners have capitalized on the movie, and why not? There are posters, photos, and other movie memorabilia throughout the pizzeria.
The staff was super friendly, and the pizza was terrific.
If you’re in the area, it’s a neat place to stop for a pie and bragging rights.
Maine
International Cryptozoology Museum – Portland, Maine
Do you have a secret desire to join an expedition to search for the Loch Ness Monster, or maybe Bigfoot? This might be just the place for you!
Cryptozoology is a field that some scholars lump into the same basket as ghost hunting or searching for evidence of UFOs.
At Jammany Hall, we aren’t saying that the above exist or that they don’t. We neither confirm nor deny our own paranormal experiences.
For all the focus on animals that might exist, the field also studies recently discovered species that do exist. An example is the relatively recent capture of a coelacanth, which is a fish that was considered extinct for over 60 million years until one was caught in 1938 off the coast South Africa.
So maybe your kid really did see a T-Rex outside his bedroom the other night…
Anyway, Loren Coleman is a big name in the cryptozoological community, and he’s built quite an awesome collection of artifacts and specimens related to cryptozoology.
Come check out Coleman’s museum and maybe it’ll inspire you or your kid(s) to become a biologist/zoologist/cryptologist and find Bigfoot or a unicorn.
You never know…
Telephone Museum – Ellsworth, Maine
(www.thetelephonemuseum.org)
If you have a phone fetish (and who doesn’t today?), you might wanna stop by the Telephone Museum in Ellsworth, Maine.
You’ll see phones and communications devices such as switchboards from days of yore (pre-1984!), and you’ll finally understand how your grandparents communicated without a handset with a camera inside.
Or games.
Or Facebook.
Or Tiktok.
You get the point.
The museum has made it its mission to gather communications devices from the earliest days of telephony, and any of these artifacts are available for you to handle.
How cool would it be to grab one of these old phones and use it to make a call?
I guess you’ll need to come to the Telephone museum and try it out for yourself.
Maine Central Model Railroad – Jonesport, Maine
(www.townofjonesport.com)
Harold “Buz” Beal loved trains. Boy, did he love trains!
He was so into trains that he decided to build his own world complete with a model train system.
Harold enlisted his wife’s help to painstakingly collect and assemble this little world. Over a span of 20 years, the Beals built a 900 square foot imaginary world of amazing detail.
Beal’s imaginary world is hand crafted using photos of actual buildings and areas they visited or had seen in photos.
The details of the objects within the little world are fantastic, and more than one visitor has had to pick his or her jaw off the floor.
The display is so impressive that Maine super native Stephen King sent the Beals some photos of his house so that they could reproduce it and place it within their little world. We don’t know if Buz’s ghost haunts King’s house (Buz died in 2012), but it would be cool with us if he wanted to hang out in his creation as Head Engineer.
The model railroad is at the Beal’s home and there isn’t a website. However, I’ve provided the town’s website at the top of the article. Check with them if you’d like updated info.
Massachusetts
House of the Seven Gables – Salem, Massachusetts
You may have read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic book, “The House of the Seven Gables” in high school. The home actually exists, and it belonged to Hawthorne’s second cousin, Susannah Ingersoll.
Hawthorne’s novel explores the life and trials of a New England family with deep ties to the area. The house dates from 1668, so those roots are really deep.
Old Nathaniel gets into guilt, retribution, forgiveness, and even the supernatural. When published in 1851, it was cutting edge.
For a look at old Salem, this is a very interesting tour. Listen, we both know that you’re coming to Salem for the witch stuff.
Got it.
But I promise that you’ll be witched-out in about an hour once you arrive in Salem.
The House of the Seven Gables is a nice way to cleanse your mental palate before diving back into the Witch Trial stuff.
So maybe learn ya somethin’ before heading over to see how they dunked witch suspects.
It could come in handy the next time you’re watching Jeopardy!
Paul Revere Lantern – Concord Museum, Concord, Massachusetts
(www.concordmuseum.org)
How easy would have Paul Revere’s job been had he been able to access some of those old phones in the Telephone Museum?
Nope, Paul had to rely on lights to get his message across.
If you remember, Paul Revere ordered some town folk to signal him by lantern from the town’s church steeple to let him know how the British Army was moving that night.
One lantern if by land, two lanterns if by sea.
Two lanterns were hung that night, so Revere and others rode the countryside warning the patriots that the British were on the move and to get ready.
This happened on the evening of April 18, 1775. The next day saw the official start of the War with the fight at Lexington green and the North Bridge at Concord.
This act is one of the most known events of the Revolutionary War, and most Americans are familiar with the story.
Concord Museum is loaded to the gills with other Revolutionary War artifacts, so come on in and steep yourself in revolution!
Whydah Pirate Museum – Yarmouth, Massachusetts
(www.discoverpirates.com)
If you’ve ever dreamed of being a pirate and traveling the Seven Seas to steal treasure and bury it, this is your place, Matey! Acktuuuuaallly, pirate experts tell us that it’s highly unlikely that pirates buried any treasure. I mean think about it. Do you kill everyone once the treasure is in the ground to prevent them from coming back and digging it up? Experts say nope, didn’t happen…
Anyway, the Whydah was a slaving ship built in England in 1715 and it moved about within the Caribbean. At least pirates had the sense to cruise around in those amazingly blue and clear waters.
If you’re gonna be a raider, raid where the weather is freakin’ amazing!
Unfortunately for the slave trading owner of the Whydah but fortunately for the pirates, the Whydah was captured by Samuel Bellamy, AKA “Black Sam”, a renowned pirate who has gone down in history as the richest European pirate to have ever lived.
Like so many ships of its day, the Whydah sucked when it came to storms at sea, and on April 26, 1717, she ended up in Davy Jones Locker just 500 feet off the coast of Cape Cod. Of the 145 men on the ship, only 2 survived the wreck. Black Sam wasn’t one of the survivors.
The Whydah was finally located in 1982 in 14 feet of water. The ship was loaded with goodies, and these eventually made their way to the Whydah Pirate Museum.
And speaking of buried treasure, the Whydah Pirate Museum is displaying the only known actual pirate booty in any museum on Earth.
And speaking of buried pirates, in 2018, human remains were found near the wreck near a pistol known to have been Black Sam’s. DNA tests were run, and the sample was shown to be from a person of Eastern European descent. So, not Black Sam.
The Whydah Pirate Museum has tons of pirate artifacts for you to drool over.
Shiver me timbers and get yer arse over here to see the Whydah’s pirate stuff!
New Hampshire
American Classic Arcade Museum – Laconia, New Hampshire
(www.classicarcademuseum.org)
Do kids even go to arcades anymore?
Well, those Fortnite addicts you’re raising (maybe even you) might wanna put down your controllers and phones and check out the American Classic Arcade Museum.
The museum rocks around 200 games on display at any given time and you can play them!
And because the museum has a policy of not displaying games built after 1987 when games started to drip blood, you can still play something innocent.
If you schedule your trip just right, you can witness the Annual Classic Video Game and Pinball Tournament. Game nerds (like you) come from around the world to crush some Tetris, Space Invaders, and other faves from the 70s and 80s.
Loosen up your gaming fingers, rub on some Aspercreme for your arthritis, and break a Guinness World Record score on a game no one has thought of since the record was set.
That means there’s more of a chance that you could be the next one…
Chutters Candy Store – Littleton, New Hampshire
Chutters Candy Store holds the distinction as possessing the world’s longest candy counter.
At 112 feet long, it holds an official Guinness record.
Yep! And with a shelf that long you know it’s gotta be a candy tsunami! The store has over FIVE HUNDRED different types of candy! Your dentist is gonna start sending busloads of patients here on free vacations.
The joint was opened in the late 1800s by a British Congregational minister named Frederick Chutter. He came to New Hampshire to banish the Devil but ended up exorcising dental health (probably).
A brochure from back in the day reads, “Mr. Chutter is a warm-hearted, cordial, and enthusiastic man, of optimistic temperament, and much interested in the welfare of Littleton.”
Sounds to me like he was trying to corner the cavity market.
Who am I kidding? If I lived anywhere near this shop, I’d be toothless, but happy.
With over 500 types of candy to sample, it would take you nearly
a year and a half at a candy a day to get through them.
Why aren’t you here yet?
Aleister Crowley’s Magickal Retirement – Hebron, New Hampshire
No website, as this is a private home.
Address: 14 Church Lane, Hebron, New Hampshire, 03241
(Please respect the privacy of the owner, and merely view the house from the street)
If you’re familiar with Ozzy Osborne’s song “Mr Crowley”, then you know he is singing about a British dude named Alistair Crowley.
Crowley was a Brit who was at his peak in the first half of the 20th century and was known as a free spirit who really dug the occult.
Back then, there was a real following around the occult, and seances were as common as your grandma’s Tupperware parties.
Crowley used many of his earthly years pursuing sex, drugs, and the occult. He wrote about these topics in several books: “Diary of a Drug Fiend,” “The Magick of Thelema,” and “The Book of the Law.”
For the time, these books were wild, to say the least.
Anyway, Crowley had a pal in New Hampshire who had a home in Hebron, so he decided to swing over across the pond and chill with her.
So, in 1916 Crowley spent about half a year in the house having fun in the way only he could.
Fun fact: Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page bought Crowley’s Scottish estate on Loch Ness.
If you’re passing through Hebron, stop by, pull up Ozzy’s “Mr Crowley”, and become one with Crowley’s Magick…
New Jersey
Infinity Climber – Jersey City, New Jersey
(www.lsc.org) See YouTube for videos.
Feeling brave, are ya?
How about playing in the Infinity Climber?
The climber is a suspended jungle gym (?) that looks like a bunch of lily pads that are enclosed in wire mesh. In other words, you aren’t going to fall, but your brain might feel otherwise.
Oh, I forgot to mention it’s suspended 35 feet above the ground.
It’s really a lot of fun, and you can see kids scampering around inside, oblivious to the height.
The steel wire netting which encloses the lily pads guarantees that you can’t fall to the hard, hard floor.
If you are really tall, it may not be the most fun you’ve ever had, because it is a bit tight.
But your rugrats will enjoy skittering about like mice in the attic.
Project Diana Site – Wall Township, New Jersey
From the outside, Camp Evans looked like another mysterious military base with some antennas and satellite dishes.
But back in 1946, an extraordinary event occurred here, thanks to Project Diana.
The big brains at Project Diana were experimenting with radio astronomy, which was a new technique. In fact, it was so new that radio astronomers hadn’t even pierced the ionosphere yet.
Diana’s equipment was the first to be able to bounce radio signals off the Moon. This meant that it was able to use the Moon as a reflector. Now that’s a satellite dish!
This may not sound like a big deal today, but way back in 1946, this was big time important because it started to open space for exploration.
Thanks to Project Diana, several planets in our solar system, Venus among them, have been accurately mapped by radar.
Once communications satellites became a common tool, the Moon was kicked to the curb, and Diana was done.
The Project Diana site is now part of the Information Age Science History Museum and Learning Center.
United States Golf Association Museum – Far Hills, New Jersey
Fore!
Do you fancy yourself the golfer?
Do you enjoy hitting the links in those cardigan sweaters and long socks?
Or do you have a highly developed hook, slice, and worm burner like mine?
Bottom line: If you’re a golf geek, this is where your golf spirit animal lives.
The US Golf Association Museum also happens to be the oldest sports museum in the country!
The museum is home to the golf club that Alan Shepard used on the Moon. Apparently, Shepard brought the club aboard as contraband (What?!?) so that he could knock a few balls around.
What is also cool about the museum is that it has its own putting course, where you can putt with old timey clubs ad balls and really see how lousy your short game is without modern golf technology correcting your lack of eye-hand coordination.
Fore!
New York
Museum of Sex – Manhattan, New York
(www.museumofsex.com)
At Jammany Hall, we’re super good at sex, (or so we tell ourselves), so we don’t need to visit. But, for the rest of you amateurs, this could be the place for you to boost up your game…
If you’re over 18, that is. No kiddoes are allowed here, so there’s that.
Daniel Gluck opened the museum in 2002 with the idea of presenting sex in a scholarly manner, in a way that is respectful of sex without getting goofy with it.
His mission was also to preserve items that might be discarded and forgotten. I don’t mean the old sex toy that you wore out, but clothing, costumes, and old film in 8mm and other old media.
Gluck has amassed over 20,000 sex-related objects, so there’s plenty to see.
The Museum’s permanent collection of artifacts is comprised of works of art, photography, clothing and costumes, technological inventions, and historical ephemera. Additionally, the museum houses both a research library as well as an extensive multimedia library.
Because of course you’re here to do some scholarly research, right?
Look, who cares why you want to cum (come) to the Museum of Sex. Just get on over!
Dead Horse Bay – Brooklyn, New York
(Do a Google search for directions)
Dead Horse Bay is a weird, weird place.
It’s weird because as you walk up and down the beach (AKA Glass Bottle Beach) you are in the midst of everyday items that were in common use nearly 100 years ago.
It’s almost post-apocalyptic in that it seems like a long lost society had left these things here and vanished. And in a way, that’s the truth.
The reality is that Dead Horse Bay was a carcass rendering facility in the mid-nineteenth century when New York City relied on horses for transportation and wagon towing power.
Horses, other than the Magic Pony, aren’t immortal. And when they keeled over in the streets of NY, someone had to deal with them.
Enter the folks at Dead Horse Bay.
Everyday, animal carcasses would be barged over to the rendering plants on Dead Horse Bay for disposal. The horses were used to make glue, oils, and fertilizers. So, the carcasses were put to good use.
The bones of the horses were chopped into bits and dumped into the bay with the waste products of the rendering process. To this day, you can still encounter chunks of horse bone strewn on the beach.
Fast forward to the early 1900s when horses were beginning to be replaced by motorized vehicles. The rendering plants went out of business, and NYC started to use the land as landfill.
Around 1940, the landfill was sealed with a thin layer of soil, and that was that.
Ummmm, not exactly.
Because the landfill sits right on the edge of the bay, water and wind erosion over the years has caused the landfill to release its contents.
Most of the organic material has been consumed by microbes, but the beach has become well-known as a place to find bottles that are up to 100 years old.
These bottles and other non-biodegradable items continuously spill out onto the beach before being washed away on the high tide.
Walking along the beach is almost like strolling through an antique shop. I’ve personally found bottles and other items on the beach that are valuable, but of course it helps to know what to look for.
If you go, check out the directions online because it can be tricky to locate.
Wear sneakers or boots because you’ll be walking on dirt, grass, and wet sand. Because of the broken glass, the thicker the sole, the better.
Kykuit, the Rockefeller Estate – Sleepy Hollow, New York
(www.tarrytownhouseestate.com)
Oh, to have been a Rockefeller back in the day!
Depending on which metric you use, John D. Rockefeller was the richest man who’s ever lived.
Thanks to his near domination of world oil production, from pulling it out of the ground to transporting and distributing the stuff, Rockefeller was in the right business at the right time (late 1800s through the early 1900s).
America and the world were switching over to gasoline-powered machinery (Hello cars!), and he had the fuels and lubricants that everyone needed.
But even if he wasn’t the top dog, he is certainly in the Top 10. And that’s just fine by me.
Good ol’ John D. built Kykuit in 1913 to be the family’s compound, and he spared no expense.
I’ve always found it interesting that he spent so much on opulence, as he was raised in near poverty in a broken home in upstate NY, and he was deeply religious.
He usually wasn’t one to blow money. Oh well.
The interior is filled with expensive antiques and superb furnishings.
The grounds were expansive and manicured, complete with fabulous gardens. He had such a love of the outdoors and his field of view, that he purchased a huge chunk of land across the Hudson directly opposite Kykuit to preserve his personal view.
Must be nice.
The estate eventually grew to nearly 3,500 acres.
Much of the estate was donated to various organizations so that the public could enjoy the property. There are about 10 Rockefeller family descendants still living on the remainder of the estate.
While Kykuit is the focus of this article, the old Rockefeller estate has plenty of other neat stuff to check out.
Go to their website (www.tarrytownhouseestate.com) and plan to spend the day in the area looking at how the other half lived.
Pennsylvania
Eastern State Penitentiary – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
If you are a fan of the ghost hunter-type shows on the documentary channels, you might have seen an episode where they visit Easter State Penitentiary in search of restless spirits.
Eventually, all these shows seem to end up doing an episode or two here.
The prison is a seriously foreboding place, and it looks like a place that angry ghosts would enjoy haunting.
It was built in 1829, and it was built to be the flagship of the modern prison system.
Rather than the typical dungeon that most prisons of the day were, Eastern State was built to provide separate cells for each prisoner.
Prisoners had their own toilets, good and plentiful food, exercise, and other bennies that we would think could make a prison stay not totally crappy.
The idea was to keep each prisoner alone so that the person could reflect on the misdeeds that brought him or her to become incarcerated.
The problem was that this technique was pretty close to solitary confinement.
This tended to drive prisoners a little batty.
You can visit the prison and take a tour of the place where Al Capone, Willie Sutton, and lots of other outlaws spent time.
Maybe you’ll catch a ghost out of the corner of your eye…
The Living Dead Museum – Evans City, Pennsylvania
(www.livingdeadmuseum.com)
Say what?!? A whole museum dedicated to everyone’s favorite head-shot targets?
The museum traces the art of the zombie from its earliest beginnings in cultures around the world to today’s popular movies and film.
George Romero’s classic, “Night of the Living Dead” was filmed in Evans City, so there is some sense to the museum being located here.
Shows like the “Walking Dead” have really amped up interest around zombies, and why not?
Zombies are goofy, but deadly. In most cases, you can outrun them.
However, check out “Kingdom” on Netflix to see a more athletic and fiercer version of our undead pals.
Anyway, bring your tasty brains on down to Evans City, PA for a trip to zombie world!
Old Jail Museum – Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania
The former Carbon County Jail is much like any other small, regional prison built in the 1800s.
It’s built like a castle or fortress, it’s dark and gloomy, and you wouldn’t want to spend a moment incarcerated in the joint.
And I’m sure that’s exactly how the four men accused of murder and membership in the Molly Maguires felt back in 1877.
The prison is infamous for being the execution spot of four Irish immigrants who were accused of murdering two coal company employees. 19th century America wasn’t the safest place to work in industry, and coal mining was particularly dangerous and low paying.
What makes their case different is in the way the men were prosecuted.
They were investigated by private police that that were hired and directed by the mine company itself.
To make matters worse, they were prosecuted by a private law firm, not local or state prosecutors.
They didn’t have the stomach to place the nooses around the men’s necks. They allowed the state to do that dirty work.
It would be like General Motors investigating, prosecuting, and sentencing its own employees.
To this day, there are movements in Pennsylvania’s state legislature to grant these men pardons due to the unconstitutional way their convictions and executions were carried out.
Hey, I’d also be an angry ghost if this happened to me.
You can take ghost tours of this old prison, and if you have the guts, do a ghost hunting expedition. Unfortunately, the museum closes at 11 PM, so there’s no overnight searching.
Rhode Island
Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health – Pawtucket, Rhode Island
(www.thecsph.org)
If you’ve ever dreamt that you were walking upright though a giant vulva, you may have visited here in a former life.
Yep, the Center houses the largest handmade vulva doorframe in the country.
The Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health is a nonprofit that was established to help people like you (probably) learn more about sex in a nonjudgmental place.
Of course, that is if you’re over 18.
You can attend workshops, get some much-needed sex therapy, or browse their extensive library.
No moaning or groaning allowed, or the Head Librarian will have to shush you!
Swing by, cum by, or just show up without your under-18 kids, OK?
Touro Synagogue – Newport, Rhode Island
As you drive around Newport, you’re immediately struck by the great number of pre-Revolution War era homes. Most of these homes have small plaques on their street-facing walls that give some history of the home’s builder and date of construction.
Some of these homes are seriously old.
As it turns out, the oldest Jewish synagogue is also to be found in Newport.
Like the Puritans, Jewish pilgrims in Europe also caught the whole “worship without persecution” bug. When they heard of this colony in the New World where they could come and be themselves without fear of pogroms, they hopped on a ship in 1658 and set sail for Rhode Island.
The first Jewish settlers established themselves in Newport and went about the activities of life and community.
In 1758, Isaac Touro, a Dutch rabbi, formed a community around the Portuguese Sephardic Jewish community in Newport. He contracted Peter Harrison to design the community’s synagogue.
The synagogue is open for tours, and it’s a powerful symbol of humankind’s drive to practice freely and live as one wishes.
The White Horse Tavern – Newport, Rhode Island
People do love to drink and have a good time, and Newport’s White Horse Tavern has seen its share of hardcore partiers over the years.
The tavern is the oldest continuously operated tavern in the US.
It opened in 1673 and served as a public house, AKA a pub. Now you know the origin of pub. You’re so smart.
Back in the day, pubs were the focal points of a community. Sure, pretty much everyone went to church, but you couldn’t exactly gossip and enjoy a mug of ale. So, it wasn’t just about going in and getting drunk. It was more of a meeting place where everyone tended to hang out. So, people of all walks of life could mingle and exchange ideas.
In the White Horse’s case, it was also a central meeting place for Rhode Island’s politicians during the pre-Revolutionary War era.
The White Horse has had some colorful owners throughout its history.
William Mayes was a pirate who inherited the tavern in 1702 and was soon slinging suds as the owner and bartender.
Imagine the stories that guy could tell!
And there’s a ghost at the White Horse, because of course there is.
The food is amazing and it’s a cool place to have a drink (or a few) and be able to say you’ve visited.
What are ye waitin’ fer, Matey?
Vermont
Ben & Jerry’s Flavor Graveyard – Waterbury, Vermont
(www. https://www.benjerry.com/whats-new/2015/flavor-graveyard-depinted)
If you’ve ever wondered where that funky Ben & Jerry’s flavor you loved went, look no more.
We hate to be the bearers of bad news, but it’s probably here at the Ben & Jerry’s Flavor Graveyard.
In 1997, the graveyard was purely in the digital realm. As flavors were developed and ultimately failed, the ice cream corpses began to stack up.
Ben & Jerry’s ice cream have a high mortality rate because those guys are just plain crazy.
You’ve likely seen flavors that just left you shaking your head, and that’s because these guys are cool with taking chances with their flavor development.
The graveyard became a physical place due to fan interest, so you can come and take a factory tour and pay your respects, or just show up to the cemetery.
There are 34 tombstones with birth and death dates so you can get an idea of the lifespan of some of these flavors. Maybe you can spill a 40 over one that you used to love but has since disappeared.
Take the factory tour and grab some ice cream while you cry alligator tears over Wavy Gravy.
Estey Organ Museum – Brattleboro, Vermont
Although not well-known today, unless you are an organ aficionado, the Estey Organ Company was a major layer in the organ business back in the day.
The company was found in the 1850s and existed for more than 100 years.
They produced over 500,000 organs in their time, and these organs are literally everywhere on Earth.
During World War II, US military chaplains were issued Estey folding organs to bring with them to the battlefield for services.
Nowadays, the company is gone, but the museum lives on in the engine room of the factory.
What’s cool about the place is that you can actually play many of the organs that are on display.
Stop in and play some heavy metal on one of the oldies. You’ll endure yourself to the retirees that are stopping by to get away from hoodlums like you!
Joseph Smith Birthplace Memorial – Royalton, Vermont
Most folks who aren’t familiar with the history of the Mormon Church usually Mormonism with Utah.
While it is true that Utah is the spiritual center of the Mormon faith, the Mormon movement began back East.
Joseph Smith was born on his family’s farm in Vermont in 1805. As families back then were wont to do, his mom had a brood of 10 kids. I’m going to guess that Joseph is the most famous of these youngsters.
When Joseph was a child, the family moved to the Midwest, where Joseph eventually claimed to have had a visit from an angel who told him the story of what would become the Book of Mormon.
He went on to found the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1830.
Unfortunately, the Mormons were not looked upon favorably in the Midwest, so they made their way to Utah and established the center of their Church in Salt Lake City.
Smith is considered by member of the Mormon Church as their Chief Prophet and first president. Not bad for a kid from a farm in Vermont!
You can visit his birthplace and see the 50 foot tall polished Vermont granite obelisk.
There is also a visitor’s center where you can learn more about Smith and the Mormons,
If you’re up for some hiking, you can also take a stroll along some of the beautiful trails that crisscross the site.
The Takeaway
So, there you have it.
As promised, we’ve given you food for thought for some cool and funky sites around the Northeast. Naturally, this list isn’t exhaustive, but we wanted to toss you some bones and maybe get you out of the house and exploring.
Everyone visits the spots that are well known. It’s so much fun to go out and see these places that are out of the way and out of the view of your typical tourist.
Jammany Hall exists to help you spread your wings. Travel is a good way to do just that.
And it often seems that the offbeat places are the most flavorful. Do you get what I’m saying? I guess you can compare it to eating a chicken breast or a thigh. There’s more flavor in the less popular thigh!
Make sure you read the other parts of this US travel series. Once you’re done checking out the entire series, you’ll have a handy guide to some goofy places to visit.
You’ll have the best stories at any party you attend!
Feel free to let us know about some of the places you’ve visited that are somewhat offbeat.