Special notice: The Aviation Museum of N.H. will be closed to the public on Saturday, July 4 so that our volunteers and employees (and you!) may celebrate this special day together with family and friends.
This Independence Day, we salute 250 years of American history—which includes a lot of aviation history!
And we’re not just talking about the 123 years since the Wright Brothers first took flight back in 1903.
Right here in New Hampshire, aviation history stretches far back into the 19th century, with the pioneering lighter-than-air ballooning adventures of Granite State native Thaddeus Lowe.
Lowe, born in Jefferson, N.H. in 1832, became so proficient at the then-new art of ballooning that in 1861 he was hired by none other than Abraham Lincoln to be Chief Aeronaut of the Union Army Balloon Corps during the U.S. Civil War.
Never heard of Thaddeus Lowe, who would go on to invent the first commercially successful ice making machine? Then you haven’t visited the Aviation Museum of N.H., where we tell his story and that of many other amazing aviation pioneers with ties to the Granite State.
You might even get to meet Thaddeus Lowe himself, as he often appears at the Aviation Museum of N.H. every October at our ‘Haunted Halloween Hangar.’ But that’s not until later this fall.
For now, have a great Independence Day—and we’ll see you at the Aviation Museum this summer!
John Adams, on the signing of the Declaration of Independence: “I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”
