KY -- Louisville -- Frazier History Museum -- The Southern Exposition and the Satellites of Mercury in the Champagne Parlor:
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Description of Pictures: The Southern Exposition and the Satellites of Mercury in the Champagne Parlor
A new new addition to the second floor of the Frazier Museum is the champagne parlor that doubles as an event space and an exhibit about the Southern Exposition (1883-1887), and the Satellites of Mercury Festival that succeeded it. The Southern Exposition was an annual, World’s Fair-like civic convention in Louisville for which Pres. Chester A. Arthur presided over the opening ceremony. The world traveled to Louisville to discover innovation through the first successful nighttime fair. The 1883 Southern Exhibition was illuminated by former Louisville resident Thomas Edison, who personally managed the installation of the recently invented incandescent light bulbs. The 4,600 bulbs used at the fair outnumbered the total number of bulbs in all of New York City at the time! Thomas Edison Included in the exhibit are facsimiles of applications, broadsides, cards, envelopes, hand-painted invitations, receipts, and welcome notes pertaining to the Expo and the Satellites of Mercury; an original, school-assigned essay by an adolescent student about her trip to the Expo; Gilded Age glassworks and kitchenware, day dresses, and a bicycle; fragments of the St. James Court fountain; and a “Salon-style” wall of paintings.
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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
FRAZSX_180917_09.JPG: The Satellites of Mercury
FRAZSX_180917_17.JPG: The Southern Exposure
FRAZSX_180917_29.JPG: St. James Court Fountain Fragments, c 1892
FRAZSX_180917_32.JPG: Louisville in the Gilded Age
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Wikipedia Description: Frazier History Museum
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Frazier History Museum, previously known as the Frazier Historical Arms Museum and the Frazier International History Museum, is a history museum located on Museum Row in the West Main District of downtown Louisville, Kentucky. An affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, the Frazier documents and reinterprets stories from history using artifacts, gallery talks, and live daily interpretations by a staff of costumed actors known as “teaching artists.”
Founded in 2004 as a museum of historical arms and armor, the Frazier later expanded its focus to cover regional, national, and international history. The museum is home to one of the largest collections of toy soldiers and historical miniatures on permanent public display in the world, The Stewart Collection. Subjects of other permanent exhibitions include historical arms and bourbon whiskey.
In 2018, the museum became the official starting point of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail tour.
History
Prehistory
Owsley Brown Frazier, a wealthy businessman and philanthropist in Louisville, was an avid collector of historical arms. In 2000, the year he stepped down as Vice-Chairman of Brown-Forman, Frazier gave a presentation to the Kentucky Historical Society called “The Art of the Weapon” which spawned the idea for a museum. In 2001, Frazier purchased the building complex at 829 West Main Street. In 2002, a website was launched announcing the “Owsley Brown Frazier Historical Arms Museum,” an institution whose stated mission was “to acclaim the artistry, craftsmanship, and technological innovation of weapons and their makers.”
In February 2003, Frazier signed a formal agreement entering into a partnership with the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds, also known as the United Kingdom's National Museum of Arms and Armour, an ancient institution of the Tower of London that was originally founded to manufacture armor for the Kings of England. The agreement outlined plans for the Frazier to borrow and display arms and armament on loan from the Royal Armouries. It was the first time that a British national museum had engaged in an ongoing collaboration with any organization beyond its shores.
Construction on the museum started in 2001 and ended in 2003. Mr. Frazier provided most of the funds for the $32 million project or backed loans that were taken out to finance the development.
Frazier Historical Arms Museum
The Frazier Historical Arms Museum opened to the public on May 22, 2004.
Its initial collection consisted of roughly 1,500 objects from the personal collection of Owsley Brown Frazier, dating from 1492 to World War I, and approximately 350 objects borrowed from the Royal Armouries, dating from 1066 to the 1960s. Included were antique guns, swords, arrows, and other historical arms and armor from Flanders, France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, as well as life-size tableaux of mannequins and horse figures depicting battle scenes from European history.
Frazier International History Museum
In June 2006, the museum was renamed the Frazier International History Museum, a nod to the multinational origins of its collection. That year, the museum received another influx of foreign arms and military artifacts from the Royal Armouries. Over time, however, it began to shift its focus away from war and weaponry and toward more general topics of state, national, and global history. The permanent collection became gradually de-emphasized as the museum moved toward larger, temporary exhibitions.
Frazier History Museum
In 2011, the museum was renamed the Frazier History Museum.
In May 2012, a bronze sculpture of a Japanese warrior riding horseback into battle by Douwe Blumberg entitled Way of Horse and Bow was gifted to the Frazier by actor William Shatner and his wife Elizabeth. In August, the museum's founder and chief benefactor Owsley Brown Frazier died.
The last remaining objects on loan from the Royal Armouries were returned in January 2015.
In April 2017, the museum hosted The Hunger Games: The Exhibition, a special exhibition about the dystopian film franchise starring Jennifer Lawrence. A Louisville native, Lawrence, partnered with the Frazier to help promote the exhibition.
Lonely Planet, in naming Kentucky Bourbon Country as one of the top 10 U.S. destinations to visit in 2018, cited the Frazier Museum as a main attraction. In March 2018, the Frazier sold the first 250 bottles of Final Reserve: James Thompson and Brother Bourbon, a whiskey whose 45 years in the barrel made it the most mature bourbon ever bottled.
In August 2018, the Kentucky Bourbon Trail Welcome Center opened on the first floor of the museum. The Frazier thus became the official starting point of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail tour, a project launched in 1999 by the Kentucky Distillers' Association to promote bourbon tourism in the state.
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