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The lunchbox's illustrious journey through history starts with a haute 1910 Louis Vuitton lunch trunk at one end of the Museum of Lifestyle and Fashion History and ends with a first-grader's award-winning pretzel-and-glue interpretation across the room.

Six-year-old Connor Walsh used an ingenious technique to cut the pretzel sticks covering his lunchbox, a homage to Abe Lincoln's log cabin.

"I chewed them," the Trinity Lutheran School student said Wednesday before running off to join the rest of his class on a field trip to the museum.

Connor and his brothers would have used only about one bag of pretzel sticks, but the chewing turned into eating, said his mother, Nannette Walsh. Still, he won first place and a school sweatshirt for his efforts.

The museum opened its new exhibit Wednesday, declared National Peanut Butter Day by the Southern Peanut Farmers Federation, with a celebration of a lunchbox staple. Curator Lori Durante served peanut-butter sandwiches with corned beef in honor of the better-known holiday, St. Patrick's Day.

The history of the lunchbox illuminates broader social trends of the 20th century, Durante said.

"You can walk the time line of a lunchbox and experience different societies' ways of life," she said. "When we see how lunches evolved we can ask, how did it affect the lunchbox? And as the lunchbox evolved, how did it affect the contents, the lunches?"

The lunchbox evolved in 1902 from the practice of emptying tin containers of tobacco, cookies and syrup, then using the tins -- or a shoebox tied with string -- to carry lunches.

In researching the exhibit, Durante debunked a popular myth that the Florida Legislature banned the use of steel lunchboxes in 1972, fearing children could use them as weapons. The legislative archives in Tallahassee had no record of the ban, she said, even though it's cited in books and television programs.

Museums, corporations and collectors donated more than 165 lunchboxes, Thermoses, picnic baskets and photos to the exhibit. The Louis Vuitton Museum in Paris donated the 1910 trunk-sized lunchbox, in pristine condition, containing a miniature stove, flask and utensils, all silver-plated.

Boca Raton resident Sharon Rose Yospe, a former Baltimore school principal, donated her mother's flowered sundress, Thermos and box she used for picnics during the 1940s. When Yospe landed a part as an extra in the movie Avalon, set in Baltimore, she wore the dress and carried the lunchbox during a picnic scene.

Some lunchboxes exhibit local history. Longtime Delray Beach resident Leilus Chapman's aluminum lunchbox from the 1930s, the handle patched with an old piece of belt, was displayed with an Ocean City Lumber apron.

Several collectors donated cartoon lunchboxes made from the 1960s to the 1980s, adorned with the likes of the Dukes of Hazzard and the Care Bears.

The lunchbox Boynton Beach resident Sue Goldman carried to high school in Brooklyn during the 1950s proved that the recent trend of using a lunchbox as a purse was not so recent after all. Goldman pasted magazine photos and foreign stamps on her lunchbox in the years before decorating the plain metal boxes became popular.

"She said her lunchbox was all the rage," Durante said. "She used it as a pocketbook."

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