By Meghan E. Gattignolo Yes, 2024 is a Leap Year! What is Leap Year and why is it something we care about? Do you know any leaplings? Is there anything people around the world do differently on Leap Day? Read on to find out more than you could ever want to know about Leap Year. …
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Clarksville: 1884
By Meghan E. Gattignolo Clarksville turned 100 years old in 1884. No one alive remembered the founding of the town, and the city was growing. Several immigrants had recently moved in to do business downtown, and as a bustling tobacco town, Clarksville had become a sophisticated hub of commerce. Clarksville had a train station, a few…
14 Ways to Celebrate Valentine’s Day 2024 in Clarksville
By Meghan E. Gattignolo Valentine’s Day is this upcoming Wednesday, and the weather forecast is cool and partly cloudy. Regardless of what the weather does – which isn’t super predictable around here anyway – you can still have an amazing Valentine’s Day this year. No matter how you like to celebrate, you’ll find something enjoyable from…
The Bennett Prize Returns to the Customs House Museum
By Meghan E. Gattignolo As a strong supporter of women artists, the Customs House Museum & Cultural Center has hosted the Bennett Prize exhibit since its first award in 2019. Women artists sometimes find it difficult to make an impression on the art world. Especially in the world of figurative art, men are often given…
How Google Data Center Community Grants Work
By Meghan E. Gattignolo When the Montgomery County Google Data Center opened in 2019, it opened up new opportunities for Clarksville. The boost in job availability was a huge benefit, as well as the inclusion of the kind of tech jobs most Clarksville residents previously had to drive to Nashville for. Another added value for…
Clarksville: 1984
Amid an exciting world awash in Day-Glo clothes, new technology, and iconic pop songs, the city of Clarksville turned 200 years old. When John Montgomery built his fort near a spring on a hill in 1784, there’s no way he could have pictured how sprawling Clarksville would become. In 1984, Clarksville citizens could think of…
Brenda Stein: Carving Treasures and Branching Out
By Meghan E. Gattignolo Nashville resident and artist Brenda Stein doesn’t know what she’d do without her trusty chainsaw. Finding fallen wood in the forest or on the side of the road is a treat for her. Raw wood is her blank canvas. The chainsaw makes it possible for her to cut found wood into…
3 Times the Museum’s 1898 Building Witnessed Clarksville History
By Meghan E. Gattignolo As we observed last month, the oldest section of the Customs House Museum & Cultural Center is now 125 years old. That’s a lot of history to observe. When the building opened to the public as a post office in November 1898, Queen Victoria was still on the throne in Britain,…
Resolutions: Where They Came From and Why We Make Them
By Meghan E. Gattignolo New Year’s resolutions sometimes get a bad rap. Maybe it’s because announcing a grand resolution gives people an annoying air of self-importance; maybe it feels pointless, knowing life’s priorities will make achieving anything new impossible; or maybe it’s because you hate it when your local gym gets crowded every first week…
3 Holiday Customs You Might Not Know
By Meghan E. Gattignolo The holiday season is celebrated with a wide variety of customs and celebrations throughout the world. Some traditions have long-reaching historical roots that have survived through the decades and reveal a little about the people who celebrate them. Here are a few that may be new to you. Day of the Night…
The 1898 Building: 125 Years of Changing Identities
By Meghan E. Gattignolo “This building is unusually flamboyant in style for its size. Its highly pitched roof with large eagles on the four corners, its steep gabled windows, and its elaborate terra-cotta ornamentation combine to give importance to what is a relatively small building. Designed as a post office for the city of Clarksville,…
Aristides and LeQuire: Kindred Artists
By Meghan E. Gattignolo Once again, the extraordinary Juliette Aristides and the irreplaceable Alan LeQuire are gracing the galleries of the Customs House Museum & Cultural Center with the presence of their artistic talents. Aristides paints and draws in the classical realist tradition, and LeQuire is one of Tennessee’s most well-known sculptors. Both have been featured…
Noel Night 2023 Gift Guide
By Meghan E. Gattignolo It’s finally upon us! The holidays are creeping up and Noel Night 2023 is just around the corner! You love Art Walk throughout the rest of the year, but have you experienced December’s Art Walk and Noel Night at the Customs House Museum & Cultural Center? Every year during December’s Downtown Art…
Meet Laura Cagaoan, Visitor Services Manager
By Meghan E. Gattignolo Laura Cagaoan is a lifetime resident of Clarksville, TN. She holds a master’s degree in education and is a hardworking mother of three. Laura is a quick study and is great at learning new skills in order to create new opportunities for herself and those around her. If Laura had to pick…
Homeschool Field Trips at the Museum
By Meghan E. Gattignolo Homeschooled students and their families are taking over the Museum one day a month during the school year! On November 7, the Customs House Museum & Cultural Center hosted a Homeschool Field Trip Day, only the second in a new series of programming offered and hosted by the Museum’s Education Department….
Veterans Day: Remembering a Tennessee WWI Hero
By Meghan E. Gattignolo Today is Veterans Day. Significantly observed on November 11th, Veterans Day was originally known as Armistice Day – and is still recognized as such in many other countries. Armistice Day was meant to commemorate the events of November 11, 1918, when Germany agreed to stop fighting, and the Great War came to an…
Jacob Lawrence: Painting History
By Meghan E. Gattignolo November is here, and the Customs House Museum & Cultural Center has a new and exciting exhibit ready for Museum guests to enjoy. Jacob Lawrence is an important artist to come out of the Harlem Renaissance. Born in 1917 and a young man during the height of the cultural movement,…
Scary Stories: 4 Reasons Why We Love Them
By Meghan E. Gattignolo One of my favorite things to do in the autumn around Halloween is to immerse myself in spooky stories. Edgar Allan Poe was a favorite author of mine as a young teen. Nothing gives me the exciting chill of dread quite like a Poe story. I know I’m not alone. On television…
The Fatal Ultimatum: Trick-or-Treating’s Spooky Backstory
By Meghan E. Gattignolo Getting in costume and going door-to-door asking for candy on Halloween night has become such a time-honored childhood rite of passage, it’s almost treated as sacred. For such a long-standing tradition, the practice seems like it has always existed. However, like all human customs, trick-or-treating had to start somewhere. Medieval souling and…
So Toxic: Everyday Dangers of the 19th Century
By Meghan E. Gattignolo Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, the 19th century was a time of extraordinary change. Industrialization changed the way everything was made. Manufactured objects and food products went from being made almost entirely inside homes or by a single person to being made in factories. Ingredients and substances were outsourced, creating an…
Eleanor Williams: A Woman for All Seasons
By Jane Slate Prominent Tennessee historian Eleanor S. Williams is no longer with us, though her decades of outstanding scholarship, community commitment and leadership leave a legacy that lives on. Eleanor’s 30 years of service as the Montgomery County historian, among many other activities, leave a rich and copious archive for future historians to build…
The Bell Witch: The Scariest Ghost Story in Tennessee
By Meghan E. Gattignolo On a secluded farm about 30 minutes from Clarksville, in Adams, Tennessee, lies the Bell Family Farm and the Bell Witch Cave. One of the most documented cases of a haunting in American history, most people have heard the story of the Bell Witch. Not only is it the most widely…
Telling Stories and Capturing Moods: Todd Saal’s Watercolor Journey
By Meghan E. Gattignolo Few things are more dream-inducing than diluted pastel pigments on creamy white paper. The colors drip into each other like raindrops pulling down the color from the sky. Images in a watercolor painting appear as if a splash of water alone created it, so intuitive and effortless they seem to be. In…
Valentine Sevier: Early Clarksville Pioneer
By Meghan E. Gattignolo The first non-indigenous residents of the Clarksville area were Revolutionary War veterans looking for new adventures and financial opportunities. John Montgomery – the namesake of Montgomery County – had established the town of Clarksville by 1784. Montgomery fought with Brigadier General George Rogers Clark during the Revolution and named the new…
Top 3 Reasons to Go See Tennessee Craft: A Statewide Member Exhibition
By Meghan E. Gattignolo For many people, art means a canvas covered in paint or a carved statue. Artistic expression can be found over many different kinds of media, however. For decades, Tennessee Craft has celebrated and highlighted artists who love to create with a broader brush. The organization supports member creators by giving them opportunities…
September 15, 1821: Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month
By Meghan E. Gattignolo September 15 through October 15 is Hispanic Heritage Month. Ronald Reagan extended Hispanic Heritage Week into a 31-day period in 1988 to recognize the influence and achievements of people from Hispanic backgrounds. September 15 was chosen as the start date for one specific reason: it coincides with the independence days of five…
Historic Greenwood Cemetery Tours are Back!
By Meghan E. Gattignolo September is here, and with the change in month comes the promise of cool air, falling leaves, cozy sweaters and… cemetery tours! Yes, the Customs House Museum & Cultural Center’s popular Historic Greenwood Cemetery Walking Tours are back this year starting September 23. Every other Saturday until the end of…
A Closer Look at The Big & the Small of It
By Meghan E. Gattignolo The Customs House Museum & Cultural Center is a place to discover new artists and get inspired by new and dexterous exhibits. The Big & the Small of It by the artist collective Women. Artists. Masters. is no exception. This amazing traveling exhibit features three different artists who have come together…
Bombs and Birdcages: Tennessee’s Nuclear Past is Close to Home
By Meghan E. Gattignolo As Oppenheimer continues to be a big box office draw, the threat of nuclear war might seem remote to many moviegoers. The creation of atomic bombs and the threat of worldwide nuclear war feels like the past and has nothing to do with our lives today, or even our personal history. …
There’s Something for Everyone at Clarksville’s Museum
By Meghan E. Gattignolo Have you visited the Customs House Museum & Cultural Center yet? If I had a penny for every time someone said to me, “I didn’t know Clarksville had a museum” with shock and surprise when I suggested they visit, I would… Well, I wouldn’t be rich, but I’d have a lot of pennies….