Cayuga Museum of History and Art

In 1936, Theodore Case and his wife Gertrude gave their Auburn estate at 203 Genesee Street to serve as a museum. The gift included the Willard-Case Mansion, the Case Research Lab — where Case invented the first commercially successful sound-on-film system in the 1920s — and a carriage house dating to the 1850s. Today the Cayuga Museum of History and Art runs all three, keeping Case's original laboratory intact as a permanent exhibit. The lab is where sound film was born. That alone is worth the trip.