Matt Gentry | The Roanoke Times

A snuff box given as a gift to William Preston from George Washington on display at Smithfield Plantation in Blacksburg.

A wreath made of human hair in a glass case at the Andrew Johnston House museum in Pearisburg.

Photos by Matt Gentry | The Roanoke Times

Museum visitors can find many pieces of history in New River Valley museums. An exhibit of late-1800s sewing and mending items is on display at the Wilderness Road Regional Museum in Newbern.

A 1926 Model T Ford hearse with a coffin in the back is a popular item on display in the downstairs display area of the Andrew Johnston House Museum in Pearisburg.

Ann Bailey, the executive director of the Wilderness Road Regional Museum in Newbern, sits in the Montgomery Room. The museum, which is in its 29th year, is displaying its Heritage Quilt Show.

The hottest, muggiest days of summer are a good time to spend perusing the air-conditioned galleries of a museum.

While some may take their historical curiosity to big-city venues such as the Smithsonian Institution or the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, not all interesting finds are a half-day's drive away.

Each of the smaller house museums of the New River Valley has its own niche and some cool artifacts that might surprise you.

Each museum offers at least a few surprising special treasures or quirky items, such as a wreath of human hair fashioned into flower shapes, a noted artist's whimsical creation on lined paper and a gift from George Washington to the local man who saved his life.

From the Model T Ford hearse to 400-year-old American Indian pottery to the bed where Mary Draper Ingles may (or may not) have been born, the holdings in the New River Valley's museums are worth a visit.

Colonial Smithfield Plantation in Blacksburg is chock-full of Colonial-period furniture and other historical objects, some with direct ties to the 1774 house and many others with local origins. But very significant items stand out, and the costumed interpreters almost always mention these within the first 15 minutes of the house tour.

The first is a little carved snuff box that George Washington presented to a friend, Col. William Preston, after Preston saved Washington from a sniping Indian. The second item, a small dagger, was found by Preston at the site of the Drapers Meadow massacre in July 1755, where his uncle James Patton was killed and Ingles and her children were abducted by the Shawnees.

It is also the site where Smithfield Plantation was built 20 years later, still under the threat of Indian attack. Both items dramatize the perilous nature of life on the Virginia frontier in the 1700s.

The last item, a portrait of Preston's grandson, William Campbell Preston, is said to have been painted by Samuel F.B. Morse before he realized art didn't pay and invented the Morse Code. It's one of those tidbits of background info you don't expect to find in the foyer of a Blacksburg house museum.

Schoolchildren are spookily surprised to find a 1926 Model T Ford hearse in the basement of the Andrew Johnston House Museum in Pearisburg. In fact, some imagine seeing something moving in the back. The hearse, on loan from Vest & Sons Funeral Home in White Gate, is fitted with wooden trim, made by an earlier Vest undertaker who was also a cabinetmaker.

The Andrew Johnston House Museum is also notable for its bedpan collection -- lovely bedpans, some of them. The assemblage of porcelain, glass and enamel urinals and bedpans looks a bit like something grandma might have on display in the hutch.

Museum Director Terri Fisher says that her grandmother used to fill a sleek, deceptively elegant glass urinal with flowers, and Fisher never guessed its origins.

Girls and women played with their hair in a big way in Victorian times. Another of the museum's unusual items is a decorative hair wreath in which human tresses are fashioned into flowers and sprigs. In the Victorian era of the late 1800s, close friends would exchange locks of hair as a token of their relationship and take clippings from a friend or relative after death as a keepsake.

Hair wreaths were assembled in a horseshoe shape. The museum's wreath seems to contain hair of several women, judging by the variety of colors.

One of the most revered objects in the museum is the worn Bible belonging to Revolutionary War Capt. George Pearis, who donated a 53-acre tract for the construction of the Giles County seat, now known as Pearisburg.

Another historically significant item is the bullet-riddled weather vane from the top of Giles County Courthouse. The fish weather vane was damaged during crossfire in an 1862 Civil War skirmish in Pearisburg.

Radford's Glencoe Museum in the home of Confederate Gen. Gabriel Wharton and houses a number of Civil War artifacts, including a federal Parrott shell that was found still live on the Battle of Cloyd's Mountain site near Dublin. That will be on display in an upcoming Civil War exhibit, along with other bullets, bayonets, haversacks and powder flasks used in Virginia battles.

But the biggest finds are the "stuff" of Radford's first residents, woodland-period American Indians who lived in the Bisset Park area in the early 17th century.

"Headdresses, pendants, arrowheads and pottery that has been pieced back together," Glencoe Director Rhonda Fleming Smith said.

"We also have the maps the archaeologists who unearthed them. There were bones, too -- lots of burials in Bisset Park -- but we don't have those, of course."

Glencoe also contains an amazing tool collection, including some woodworking tools modified for children to use at the museum. The extensive collection took months to identify and catalog.

Christiansburg's Montgomery Museum and Lewis Miller Regional Art Center holds prints of its folk artist namesake, who chronicled the events and folkways of his adopted home in Southwest Virginia almost as well as he did his birthplace in central Pennsylvania.

The Montgomery Museum is fortunate to have two original Miller sketches, "Rock of My Salvation" and "Monument in Memory of Dr. Martin Luther." But even more telling is his original valentine painstakingly designed and decorated on lined tablet paper for an adored niece.

The Wilderness Road Regional Museum in Newbern contains what some say is Ingles' 1732 birth bed that came with the Draper family from Philadelphia. Not everyone agrees.

But the museum does have a bed with a long history in the Pulaski Room. The museum also holds an 1860-era Chickering pianoforte that is -- amazingly -- not hands-off. Children are allowed to plink on the antique while passing through.

There's also a piece of the Ingles ferry that Mary's husband, William Ingles, used to operate across the New River near Radford. And -- for an element of mystery -- the museum displays several items still waiting to be identified, such as a round wooden block with a handle that activates a variety of choppers.

"We ask our visitors what this is, and one of these days someone will tell us," museum volunteer Judith Harman said.