The Alamogordo Museum of History is small, but packed full of nice displays. Admission is free, which fits our budget perfectly! We enjoyed our visit and highly recommend you stop in, too! It is located in the same building as the Visitor's Center.
One of the main attractions at the museum is this 47 star flag commemorating the addition of New Mexico as a state on January 6, 1912. Because Arizona became the 48th state the very next month on February 14th, an official 47 star flag was never adopted. According to the brochure flags are only adopted in July. The 47 star flag came about when a flag making company jumped the gun in production! This 47 star flag and only one other is known of. The other flag is housed at the Palace of Governors in New Mexico's capital city of Santa Fe.
This museum visit seemed to be an exercise in vocabulary and photography techniques! Here is a display of atlatls. There's a scrabble word for you! An atlatl is an Aztec word for spear thrower. I wasn't aware there were spear throwers! A spear thrower or atlatl facilitates the throwing of a spear by making it go further and faster! Not really sure how these atlatls work, though.
This is a nice piece for grinding corn. It is called a metate y mano. The metate is the rock slab and the mano is the hand held grinding stone. The small round stone is lighter in weight and smoother. It appeared as though it would be used to grind the corn into a powder.
It's a concretion! Is that a fancy word for petrified dinosaur cow pie???
This is an Internet picture of Bowling Ball Beach in Mendocino County, California. These are concretions! A concretion is defined as a compact mass of sedimentary rock formed by the precipitation of mineral cement within the spaces between the sediment grains. Concretions form within layers of sedimentary strata that have already been deposited. The concretionary cement often makes the concretion harder and more resistant to weathering than the host stratum. Concretions are most often ovoid or spherical, but can be irregular in shape, too. Concretions! That's definitely something I hadn't heard of!
I'm proud of capturing this picture covered in glass! You can't put your camera against the glass to cut out glare like when taking a picture of a room display through Plexiglas. The overhead fluorescent lights created a wide bright band across the glass and other images were reflected in the glass when shooting straight into the picture. The same happened shooting from the side. Technique: Squat down low and shoot upward!
This picture is depicting Buffalo Soldiers. After the Civil War, 12,000 Black American soldiers fought in the regular army in the Indian wars of the West. They were assigned to four all black regiments, the 9th and 19th Calvary, and the 24th and 25th Infantry. The nickname Buffalo Soldiers was a badge of honor conferred by their Indian foes. The name referred to the troop's fighting spirit, which was like the sacred buffalo in stamina and strength!
This is a very classy desk set complete with quill pen holder, ink well, blotter, and ash tray! Are you of an age to have used this type pen and a jar of ink at school? I'm 61 and I never used this type pen when in school, but got to use the quill pen with its own ink cartridge for awhile! We felt very clever saving on the cost of ink cartridges, by refilling the pen's cartridge using a jar of ink and a hypodermic needle! The desks in the elementary school I attended still had a hole in the desk tops for an ink well!
I remember them all! It's kind of scary, when things you grew up with start showing up in museums of history! Roy says not to get any ideas about wearing a "Fragile, do not touch sign" like we see on things of our age on display! That man reads my mind! ;-)
