Museums & Rainy Days

This corner of the Highlands was an industrial landscape long before it was a weekend one. Iron came out of these hills for two centuries, and the zinc deposits a few miles west are among the most mineralogically famous in the world. The museums here are mostly about that, and they are better than the phrase “local museum” suggests.

Everything below was checked with the operator rather than a listings site. Hours still change, so call before you drive.

Where they are

The two worth planning a day around

Minerals, if the first one caught you

For a day with children

The specialist one, which is better than it sounds

Which of these actually work in the rain

The page is called Rainy Days and four of the six are seasonal or partly outdoors, so it is worth being plain about which ones a wet forecast rules out.

• Sterling Hill is the one to pick. The tour is underground, so the weather stops mattering the moment you go in — it is the same fifty-something degrees down there in July and in January.
• Brotherhood’s cellars, in the wineries guide, are the same argument in a different valley.
• Long Pond Ironworks has a small indoor museum and a large outdoor village. In rain it becomes a twenty-minute visit rather than an afternoon, but the riverside walk through the ruins is flat, shaded and rather good wet.
• Franklin is half indoors: the collection is under a roof, the mine dump you collect from is not.
• Space Farms and Museum Village are largely outdoors and seasonal. Neither is a rainy-day plan.
• The Harness Racing Museum is entirely indoors and the shortest drive of the three in New York.

Why Sterling Hill glows

The Rainbow Tunnel is not a light show somebody installed. The rock here is the rock: Franklin and Sterling Hill sit on a zinc deposit unlike any other in the world, and the two ores that made it worth mining — willemite and franklinite, in a matrix of calcite — happen to be among the most strongly fluorescent minerals anywhere. Under ultraviolet light the willemite burns green and the calcite red, and what you are looking at is a mine face, not an exhibit.

Between them the two mines have produced more than three hundred and fifty mineral species, several dozen of which were first described here and are found nowhere else. That is why a small museum in Ogdensburg draws mineralogists from other continents, and why the gift shop is unexpectedly serious.

If it rains the whole weekend

Two museums is the sensible ceiling and Sterling Hill should be one of them. For the rest of it: the ironworks walk is five minutes away and improves in bad weather, the tasting rooms up in Warwick are indoor rooms with fires in them, and the village itself is a walkable afternoon of shops and lunch.

The house is built for the other half of that weekend. The great room takes the whole party around one fire, the games are in the cabinet rather than in a cupboard somebody has to ask about, and the guidebook in the kitchen lists what is where. A wet Saturday indoors here is not a consolation prize.

Wineries and cideries · The lake, end to end · What is at the house

Two notes

Ringwood Manor, the ironmaster’s mansion twenty minutes away in Ringwood State Park, is the obvious thing to add to this list and we are leaving it off on purpose: the interior is closed to the public for an exterior restoration project, with no reopening date announced. The grounds and the surrounding trails are open and well worth the walk — just do not drive out expecting a house tour. Call the park first if that is the plan.

Not a museum, but worth five minutes if you are passing: a Lockheed Constellation is built into the terminal building at Greenwood Lake Airport. It is a strange and rather wonderful thing to come across on an airfield this small.