Hagley Museum

There are more than the usual number of events around the region next weekend, so get out your traveling shoes.Family Day next Sunday is one of the big events of the year at the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Del. The setting is the original du Pont mills, estate and gardens. The entire complex will be open to visitors and activities are geared to life in the 19th century. There will be a Civil War encampment by the 61st New York Volunteer Infantry Mifflin Guard, whose members will participate that afternoon in a 19th century baseball game (played by the 1845 rules of the Knickerbocker Baseball Club)

"Nineteenth Century School Days" will be presented today from 12:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. at the Hagley Museum and Library, on the grounds of the old du Pont mills in Wilmington, Del. The program will be held in the Sunday School building. Since most of the children worked in the mills, Sunday was the only day to attend school. Interpreters will talk about those days and visitors can write with quill pens and read from old textbooks. Admission is $8 for adults, $6.50 for senior citizens and students, $3 for ages 6 to 14, free for children under 6. It includes admission to the museum, the du Pont mills, mansion and gardens.

Among the first of the great houses in the region to celebrate the Christmas season is Oatlands Plantation near Leesburg, Va. The holiday season at Oatlands opens on Saturday and continues through Dec. 22.Decorations throughout this classic revival mansion re-create a Victorian Yuletide, with kissing balls of aromatic boxwood and arrangements of magnolia leaves, pine cones, fruits and nuts. Much of the material used is gathered from the plantation grounds, and the decorations are reconstructed from descriptions in a diary of Elizabeth Grayson Carter Beach, who was born at Oatlands in 1867.