Exploring our Heritage

Last week I wrote about the Heritage in Flight museum on the grounds of the Logan county airport in Lincoln, IL.  This week I'd like to take my followers inside the museum.  As you walk in the door the first thing to strike you is how Much stuff they have crammed inside. Uniforms from every war, artifacts donated by local servicemen, memento's and more. There's models built by local craftsmen, there's souvenirs brought back from countless deployments oversea's, There's vintage posters representing branches of the service including one from the Airship Service which doesn't even exist anymore! (Can you imagine going to war in a dirigible?)

There's case after case after case filled with the everyday tools of flight, including emergency kits issued during WW 2 filled with basic survival gear like fishing line, maps, and even emergency rations. (Can you say Spam?)  There is, in fact, so much stuff crammed into this one museum that it's spilled out into a nearby hanger to handle the overload. The day we were there I'm sure we only scratched the surface of everything the museum has to offer.

The Heritage in Flight museum is open by appointment only and I highly recommend that if you are a fan of the Military or of Airplanes in general that you take the time to make a trip down old Route 66 to visit this wonderful resource.

Heritage in Flight

On a recent outing we were invited to come up to the Fulton County airport and visit the Heritage in Flight museum. Lil Nick, Tom Anderson and I drove down on a day that was a LOT warmer than today and were given a private tour thru the buildings and surrounding property.  It's filled with  memorabilia from the early days of aviation as well as artifacts from World Wars one, two, Korea and more. 

We saw one case after another filled with display's donated by local boys who had served with distinction and the minutiae they had collected along the way. In addition there were period vehicles on site as well as several 'warbirds' on static display including a F4B-Phantom II, a T-33A Shooting Star, an A-7E Corsair II and more. There was so much to see that I'm sure we only scratched the surface of everything this little museum has to offer.

The museum is in Lincoln, IL. at the airport and is open by appointment only. It IS handicap accessible and as an interesting side note the building itself is a former army barracks from the former Camp Ellis, a WW 2 German prisoner of war camp located between Bernadotte and Ipava. I highly recommend the museum to anyone as fascinated with aviation history as I am.