Durham, North Carolina: Tobacco Museum: Farmer Robot

Great exhibits and the tour guides were wonderful! In addition to the creepy moving man, there's also a great little piece of Americana that shows you the different cigarette ad commercials from the 1940s on.

We got to the Tobacco Museum 3 minutes before it closed (5 pm), but the staff there was awesome and, after hearing how far we traveled and what we were doing (visiting stuff from RoadsideAmerica.com), they turned the robot back on one more time for our viewing pleasure.

He was amazingly creepy.

In Durham, NC there is a Tobacco Museum on the grounds of the Duke Homestead. Built in the 70's, the museum contains a lot of pretty run of the mill tobacco memorabilia. The one thing worth seeing is the talking farmer mannequin. He's a little larger than life sized, and when you push the button, he starts talking, gesticulating, and swerving his head around with the kind of movements found only in automatons. We saw one little kid who was delighted, and one who was absolutely terrified. Once he's done with his speech, the lights dim and he settles down, only to jerk and move one last time.