Prohibition Museum Experience

My husband and I went to the Prohibition Museum in Savannah yesterday for a date day. I was drawn to it after a recent visit to the county museum in Florence, SC, where I learned that South Carolina had enacted statewide Prohibition years before the national ban--a fact which required a small, emergency edit to my Tapestry manuscript!  Phew! Thank goodness I took the time to visit that museum!  I was surprised how much I didn't know before going in the Prohibition Museum, too, such as: When Georgia also enacted statewide Prohibition (yes, way before national Prohibition, eight years before South Carolina), Savannah and residents of neighboring counties considered seceding from the state!

The museum was so well done, quite entertaining! It starts a bit on the side of Prohibition and gradually goes extremely anti-Prohibition, winding up in the historic Speakeasy. The visit to their Speakeasy incorporates the senses better than most museums with historic drinks like the Aviation and the Mary Pickford (a fruity cocktail). Totally sympathetic with women of the Temperance movement, but I enjoyed the Aviation, too!  I’d seen the violet drink made just in June during the Historical Novel Society conference as a popular early-20th-century drink.

A couple invited us to sit with them at their table in the Speakeasy (they’d nabbed it when my hubby stepped away, and I think they may have heard us lamenting losing our table). Anyhow, they were from Houston, visiting for the weekend for an annual tourist trip to Savannah. So nice talking with them, but the gist of it for me was a bigger appreciation for actually living in Savannah, as it really is quite lovely. Mostly.  I always get tickled when I meet people who've traveled from afar to experience what I get to do at a fraction of the cost.  Not that they don't have their own nearby attractions that they likely avail themselves of, as well, but I do think we have more than most, being such a tourist destination (and near to others like Charleston and St. Augustine, Orlando and beaches...).

Definitely a fun outing. There was so much information and all these amusing/entertaining cartoons and such of the era. Loved it! My one criticism, I suppose, is that a fantastic exhibit somewhere in the middle, a main feature, has Mr. Busch arguing fairly persuasively for anti-Prohibition, whereas the Temperance speaker focused more on God than practical arguments, making her seem an extremist--not helped by that being in the same room where they feature Carrie Nation, who did not represent most of the Temperance movement. I think perhaps that's where the shift occurs... The displays over the course of the museum really did follow the historical sequence, including with the shift in public reaction. And even though perhaps it seems a waste to us that Prohibition was enacted, it drastically reduced rates of child abuse and likely alcohol-related deaths overall, and I had the sense that alcohol consumption never returned to the pre-Prohibition levels.  Yet despite my Temperance leanings, I was so charmed with the crowded Speakeasy's ambiance. Bars are generally lined with TVs these days, and all the flickering lights are distracting and obnoxious, in my personal opinion. Perhaps it's for the best that they repulse me, as I suspect this near-teetotaler could easily become a lush!

Overall, a wonderful experience for two whose maternal grandfathers were both bootleggers--a topic also well-addressed at the museum, of course!