This weekend we’ve had a museum parked in our driveway. It’s the “BUS-eum” from the Traces Center for History and Culture in St. Paul, hosting a traveling exhibit on German POW’s in the US during World War II. We were happy to host the BUS-eum’s Irving Kellman over the weekend in-between stops in Cape May Courthouse and Vineland.  I asked him to give us the story of the German POWs on video.

As you might guess, there was a lot of Quaker connections in the 1940, with American Friends Service Committee involvement. Traces’ director Michael Luick-Thrams is a Friend and did his PhD thesis on the Scattergood Hostel, a refugee camp set up at the then-abandoned Friends school in Iowa. Many of the BUS-eum’s stops are Friends Schools, with public libraries being another common destination.

The visit was made with help from FGC’s Directory of Traveling Friends. I think this is the first time we’ve actually had a visitor after a decade of being listed there (most past inquiries have fallen through when they looked at a map and realized our distance from Pendle Hill, New York City or whatever other destination brought them east).