Biedenharn Museum & Garden — Attraction in Monroe

This was a great stop that I found on a brochure. If you do not stop here if in Monroe then you made a mistake. Coke bottling museum was both interesting and unique. The Beidenharn home was beautiful as it was decorated for Christmas. We were the only ones there and the lady gave the tour was obviously excited about the homes history and provided all sorts of incite into the family's life.

Art lovers - The Bible museum is filled with art. I especially loved the telling of the crucifixion in sculpture paired with modern art paintings. The artist who paints on cardboard? Amazing! The house also has items I consider to be very artistic. There is also metal art in the gardens along with statues that weigh around 17,000 lbs!

Nature lovers - The gardens! The gardens are beautiful, but filled with mosquitoes. (They weren't invited, this is just part of living in the South!) My tip? Go to the left to get to the still-working, 5 cent glass bottled Coca-Cola machine. Buy yourself a drink and use that great bug spray they have right there by the machine before you go any farther. Now, afterwards, you have pathways to explore, statues to admire and fountains to watch and listen to on your way around. The visitors area has a great gift shop and also has one of the handy-dandy nickel...

We bought tickets to tour the house when we purchased tickets to see the Coke museum next door. It is a curiously designed building which, if I remember correct, was told cost $6,000 when it was built in 1913. (one guide said 1916 so not sure which date was correct.) It was the property of the childless Emma Louise who toured Europe as a singer until WWII and returned home and never moving again. After her father died she bought out her brothers and began redecorating to her varied tastes: ending with a Oriental ensemble. The extensive gardens were her idea as her father loved his vegetable garden, chickens and pigs. (There was at least one pig that would get a Coke every day.) She tore all that up and installed a replica of the European gardens she saw in her years in Europe. No pigs, and no chickens, but lots of tropical and semi-tropical plants. She had permission from her father to go down to New Orleans and purchase a statue for the garden and returned home with five. Fascinating history about the family that put a bottle of Coke into millions of hands over the past hundred...

What a horrible lasting impression!

Five of us arrived for pictures to greet a polite woman named Becky at the garden's gate. We had never been and did not know where to start. We were told to go down the block to pay for admission inside the museum and we would need to accommodate a scheduled photography session.

Well.. we get inside the museum, excited and was greeted by a crass woman whose name I did not catch. She not only was unnecessarily aggressive about making a point of the customers of the museum but had the audacity to go so far as to tell us that we should just go ahead and take the tour while we were there since we paid for it.

In the interest of making an honest opinion of the place, here's the gist:

The gardens are marvelously beautiful and none of us will ever return there again because of that woman's attitude towards us. God bless Becky for making our experience past that introduction bearable. It is truly unfortunate that a place so well kept is fronted by one of the rudest attitudes I have encountered at an...