♪♪ Journeys along the Great River Road National Scenic Byway provide travelers with a front-row seat to the Mississippi River's role in shaping the West.

A great learning stop can be found in Clinton at the Sawmill Museum.

A lot of people don't know that Clinton is actually a big part of the entire country's lumber industry, especially in the late 1800s.

The Sawmill Museum is basically conceived to tell that story and share it with people around here.

Kohlsdorf: From the 1850s to 1900s, Clinton, Iowa, played a critical role in the western expansion of the country.

Clinton is right here on the Mississippi River.

We're kind of one of the more older towns in Iowa, just with the exploration of people moving westward.

And so, with the lumber industry, we were kind of really in the right place, right time, right here on the Mississippi.

You know, we're in between like, Minneapolis and St. Louis and then also Chicago and Omaha and then further west.

Kohlsdorf: The Sawmill Museum provides visitors with a hands-on experience through a variety of exhibits.

Mossman: We have a lot of really fun things, especially for interactive for kids.

We have our cabins, if you want to try and get an idea of life at a lumber camp when they were cutting down the trees.

Now, gentlemen, look sharp!

We have animatronics of our lumber barons, where you can come and watch a show.

We have a really fun, interactive water table, where you can go and simulate what it was like for rafters going down the river, bringing the lumber from the lumber camps down to the sawmills here in Clinton.

And we also have a really fun, interactive video game of that log-raft ride, where you get to control your own log raft and try and get down to Clinton losing as few of your logs and your people as possible.

Kohlsdorf: A staff of volunteers helps the Sawmill Museum stay afloat in numerous ways.

Mossman: We actually have people who are volunteers.

They come in.

They help with fixing and building some of the things for the museum.

Some of them actually also use the equipment to build some of the things that we sell in our gift shop.

Kids love it here.

There's so much for them to, like, do, and play.

Even though it's kind of a small museum, we make sure that there's a lot of engaging and interactive things that they can do.

Ivers: Here at the Sawmill Museum, we do kind of want to unearth it for people to know.

A lot of people aren't necessarily aware of exactly what happened.

We're known as, like, the lumber capital of the world, but a lot of people don't know exactly what that means or what happened here.

So, it's kind of our mission to bring that local history to life for people that live here, people traveling to learn about it.