Ten thousand Indian artifacts, eight thousand Toby jugs and a fried bologna sandwich.  How can that not make for a great Date Day?  Day two of Spring was too cold to spend outside, so we continued our tour of lesser known museums in and around Chicago.  Today we went to Evanston to hit the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian and the American Toby Jug Museum.

Up first were the Indians.  We expected a small, and somewhat campy, experience but ended up being impressed.  The museum’s primary exhibit, A Regional Tour of American Indian Cultures, includes artifacts from the five major Indian regions of the US and Canada; Woodlands, Plains, Southwest, Pacific Northwest, and Arctic.  It’s an impressive display of clothes, tools and religious items and even includes a full-sized birch bark canoe.  Theresa especially enjoyed the intricate jewelry and woven blankets, while Tom liked the boots and snow goggles of the Artic tribes.  We also learned that tipi is a perfectly fine way to spell teepee, as is tepee.

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On the museum’s second floor is a temporary exhibit (through Feb 2019) focused on Native American woven art.  The exhibit includes many rugs and baskets and walks you through the processes used to create them by hand.  We learned about the complexities of creating water tight baskets, the symbolism behind specific designs and Theresa even got to try her hand with a loom.  Unfortunately, she spent more time pointing out the mistake a 6-year old made before her than doing any actual weaving.

Before we knew it, we had spent over an hour at the museum and it was time to move on.  Originally, we planned to go to an art museum, but Theresa stumbled upon something different while we were driving around waiting for the museum to open.

Before today, we had never heard of a Toby Jug.  It turns out that they are quite popular, in some circles, and have been around since the early 18^th century.  Originally, Toby jugs were used to carry beer from bar to table and were all modeled after a famous drinker from Yorkshire, England named Henry Elwes.  Henry was better known on the drinking circuit as “Toby Fillpot” and was memorialized in a song called “The Brown Jug” in 1761.  According to legend, the first Toby jug was created from Elwes’ ashes and was placed on his favorite bar, always to be kept full.

Over the years, the jugs have morphed from likenesses of Toby to just about anything else you can imagine.  They range in size from quite large to smaller than a penny (see our pictures).  The founder of the museum acquired his first jug 65 years ago and has been collecting them ever since.  We thought we would find a few dozen or maybe as many as a couple hundred jugs in the museum.  Holy Toby, were we off!  The museum has over 8,000 jugs on display and is the largest of its kind in the world and probably the universe as well.

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The oldest jugs in the museum date back to the 1760’s, while the newest ones have been recently created.  We spent a fun hour or so wandering amongst the cases, challenging each other to find the most creative jugs.  We saw the original, “Ordinary Toby’s” and marveled about how different they could look since they were based on the same mold.  Only the paint was different, but each jug looked to be unique.

As we progressed through the museum, we saw jugs based on animals (Theresa loved the Frog Toby), celebrities (Elvis, Mr. Spock, the Beatles and hundreds of others), famous politicians and word leaders.   We even saw a couple of jugs with topless women and christened them Jugs Jugs.  The only thing we couldn’t find was a Homer Simpson Jug, but we’re pretty sure they will have one someday.  This fun and interesting museum is well worth the trip to Evanston all by itself.

Playing Jugs and Indians all morning long tends to make us hungry, so it was time to head to downtown Evanston for lunch at Farmhouse Evanston.