Got up early to vote this morning, since I believe that visiting the polls for a few minutes isn’t any riskier than going to a grocery store. Also, I am just mossbacked enough to want to vote on election day, just as my parents and grandparents et al. did, though I don’t begrudge anyone else the vote at some other convenient time or place.

It only took a few minutes. Few other people were there at the time. I’ve seen more in mid-day, especially during the 2008 election. Only one thing on the ballot made me smile this year: Willie Wilson, candidate for U.S. Senate from the Willie Wilson Party. That’s the best name for a party since the Rent is Too Damn High.

A few miles outside of Lewistown, Illinois, is the Dickson Mounds Museum. As the sign says, it’s a branch of the Illinois State Museum.

We arrived just after it opened at 10 on October 17. I hadn’t visited any museums of any kind since the Getty Villa back in February, for obvious reasons. But I figured the risk of infection at a place like Dickson Mounds was very low. For one thing — the main thing, actually — almost no one else was there, even on a Saturday.

And I mean no one. Entrance is free, so we didn’t have to interact with the woman behind the entrance counter. There might have been a few other employees of the museum around, but we didn’t see them. As we were leaving less than a hour later, we saw a couple with a small child entering. That was it.

The main museum building.

Completed in 1972, it looks something like a set from Logan’s Run, only browner.

The museum is reasonably interesting, including a temporary exhibit of gorgeous prints by Audubon. Mostly the place focuses on the Mississippian peoples who lived in the area 1,000 years ago and more, and who, like a number of other peoples, left mysteriously before Europeans ever came to the Americas.

But the story of the museum itself is just as interesting if not more so, I think. For example, we were nearly 30 years too late to see any skeletons.

In the 1920s, a resident of these parts, one Don Dickson, started digging into Indian mounds on his family’s farm. He discovered skeletons. Lots of them. Maybe in the 19th century, such a find would have been unearthed and put into a traveling show, a seriously undignified outcome for human remains.

Dickson had a different idea, however, one more suited to his time, when Americans were more mobile than ever. He built a private museum around the skeletons in situ and people came to see them.

Not that dignified an outcome either, but at least the archaeological value of the site wasn’t completely destroyed. According to the museum, University of Chicago archaeologists investigated the area for years.

In 1945, Dickson sold the site to the state of Illinois, which later built the current building and still displayed the skeletons for decades. By the 1980s, the indignity of that arrangement was more widely understood, so in 1992 the state sealed off the remains beneath the building. Visitors today would not know about them unless they do further reading.

(Do people say the museum is haunted? That’s all it takes for a place to be considered haunted, after all.)

The museum also includes a lot of undeveloped land. A number of well-marked trails cross the land, so we took a walk.

Second-growth forest, I suspect, if this used to be farmland. A large section of land was fenced off with a tall mesh fence. Archaeological sites that wankers might try to plunder? Could be, though nothing about the fence explained its presence.