Note: This column was published in the Barrow Journal in October 2015.

If you have young children, they may not be old enough to appreciate Georgia’s history or the beautiful homes you can tour along the Antebellum Trail, but you may be able to sneak some of that in on a day trip to the Natural History Museum at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville. Our boys love fossils, so we spent a long time in this small museum, and then we enjoyed exploring the beautiful campus and viewed some of the historical buildings too.

The Natural History Museum is only a 2,500-square-foot room in Herty Hall, but it is jam-packed with fossils and exhibits that will teach you about ancient life forms. Georgia College holds one of the largest repositories of fossils in the southeast, covering the last 500 million years, and it’s the official repository for National Park Service specimens too. Though small, there’s still enough to keep you busy for well over an hour as you slowly make your way around the room.

My boys are excited about seeing any kind of fossil or bones, but some of the highlights were the large cephalopods, a crinoid and trilobites. There was a fossil of a large amphibian from the late Triassic found in Poland that looked similar to an alligator’s head. The fossil of a dinosaur egg was pretty cool, and a skeleton of a Smilodon, or saber-toothed cat, was a favorite.

After the museum, we walked to the Ennis Hall, the Department of Art, hoping to check out an art exhibit, but at that time, they were between art shows. We still had fun checking out the beautiful, old antebellum buildings that have been turned into office buildings and classroom space. The main part of campus has a large green area with beautiful trees to walk under.

We stopped by the Old Governor’s Mansion, which was the home of eight governors, their families, slaves and free servants from 1839-1868 when Milledgeville was the state capital of Georgia. (The capital moved to Atlanta in 1868 due to Atlanta’s superior rail service.) During the Civil War, General William T. Sherman’s army captured the mansion, and it served as his headquarters. Now it’s a museum, and you can take tours there too, but we didn’t think our young boys would be patient enough for that, so we just enjoyed walking around the block and checking out the gardens.

Downtown Milledgeville is also within walking distance. It’s quaint, and it has plenty of shops to peruse. We found some old comic books in an antique store that has kick started my nine-year-old’s enjoyment of reading silently to himself. (Score!) We even found a restaurant that served food my picky eaters would eat too.

Since it’s only two hours away, Milledgeville makes a lovely day trip. You can go for the fossils, or the history, or just a lovely stroll down some beautiful streets.

Find out more about the natural history museum at this website: http://www.gcsu.edu/nhm. It’s free and open to the public from 8a.m. to 4p.m. Monday through Friday. There is free 2-hour parking outside the building, which will give you plenty of time to see the exhibits. Large groups can make reservations for a tour.