Museums37.7737° N, 122.2766° W
Alameda, CA
Rows of playable pinball machines trace the art and mechanics of the game from early electromechanical tables through modern designs.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
Museums
Everything OddWay knows about. Narrow it down by what you're after, or where you're going.
Museums1,031
Suggest a stopSmall, specific collections run by people who care far too much.
- Museums61.5985° N, 149.1130° W
Palmer, AK
The museum interprets the 1935 Matanuska Colony project, when federal planners relocated farming families to Alaska. That unusual New Deal experiment shaped Palmer's street plan, farms and surviving colony architecture.
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- Open to visitors
- Museums40.9135° N, 74.1788° W
Paterson, NJ
Housed in the former Rogers Locomotive Works, the Paterson Museum preserves locomotives, industrial machinery, Colt firearms, minerals and objects tied to the city's manufacturing history. The eclectic collection reflects how many different industries once clustered around the Great Falls.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums39.5363° N, 82.4446° W
Logan, OH
This tiny museum beside the Hocking Hills Regional Welcome Center holds thousands of pencil sharpeners collected by the late Paul A. Johnson and later expanded through additional donations. The display ranges from ordinary desk sharpeners to novelty designs shaped like animals, landmarks and household objects and can be visited during welcome-center hours.
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- Open to visitors
- Museums47.9610° N, 102.1316° W
Parshall, ND
Artist and collector Paul Broste assembled rocks, minerals and geological specimens from around the world inside a distinctive stone museum. The building and collection together feel like a personal cabinet of geological obsessions enlarged to museum scale.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums47.0037° N, 94.7306° W
Akeley, MN
Opened in 1984, combining Paul Bunyan memorabilia with photographs and artefacts from Akeley's years as a logging and sawmill town. Volunteer-run, directly behind the town's giant kneeling Paul Bunyan statue, and generally open in summer when volunteers are available.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums44.8105° N, 91.5179° W
Eau Claire, WI
A reproduction of an 1890s Wisconsin logging camp, built in Carson Park in 1934-35 with help from men who had actually done the work. Now part of the Chippewa Valley Museum campus: bunkhouse, cook shanty, blacksmith shop and equipment exhibits. Seasonal, and admission is charged.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums44.9390° N, 93.3434° W
St. Louis Park, MN
Historic radios, televisions, broadcast equipment and recording technology trace how electronic media entered everyday life. Rows of obsolete machines make the museum a strong stop for travelers interested in technology that now looks stranger than it once did.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums43.9078° N, 69.9599° W
Brunswick, ME
Bowdoin College’s Arctic museum preserves artifacts, photographs, equipment, and records connected with Arctic exploration and northern cultures. Its collections are closely tied to explorers Robert E. Peary and Donald B. MacMillan, both Bowdoin graduates.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums48.9733° N, 97.2546° W
Pembina, ND
A museum near the Canadian border interprets thousands of years of human history in one of the state's oldest settlement regions. Its observation tower also makes the borderland geography itself part of the exhibit.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums41.4172° N, 87.3658° W
Crown Point, IN
Inside the historic Old Lake County Courthouse is an eccentric collection that has included thousands of pencils alongside mannequins, local memorabilia and displays tied to courthouse history. The strange assortment makes the building more than a conventional courthouse museum, but exhibit access follows the historical society's seasonal hours.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums41.5060° N, 81.6084° W
Cleveland, OH
The Dittrick Medical History Center holds the Percy Skuy Collection, roughly 1,100 historical contraceptive devices, prototypes, packaging pieces and related artifacts assembled into one of the most extensive collections of its kind. The museum is free and open to the public, but as of 2026 its regular gallery hours are limited to Fridays and Saturdays.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums39.6364° N, 86.8619° W
Greencastle, IN
Inside DePauw University's Julian Science and Mathematics Center is a large periodic table containing actual element samples or representative objects whenever safety allows. Instead of treating the periodic table as a flat chart, the installation turns chemistry into a cabinet of physical curiosities.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums31.9722° N, 102.0907° W
Midland, TX
A museum devoted to oil geology, drilling technology and the petroleum boom, with historic rigs and machinery spread across indoor and outdoor exhibits.
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- Open to visitors
- Museums37.4157° N, 79.1579° W
Lynchburg, VA
Lynchburg's Pest House served as a quarantine facility for contagious patients and later became closely associated with Civil War-era medical history. The building was moved to Old City Cemetery in 1987 and now contains period medical displays that visitors can examine as part of the cemetery's historic grounds.
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- Open to visitors
- Museums46.9822° N, 103.5377° W
Medora, ND
A remote trail leads to one of the highest concentrations of petrified wood in the United States, including large fossilized stumps from a swampy Paleocene landscape. NPS changed the legal driving approach in 2026; follow the current approved route and never remove fossil wood or stone.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums41.1252° N, 101.7146° W
Ogallala, NE
This unusual gallery centers on petrified wood, fossils, minerals and detailed artwork created from stone and fossilized material. The collection turns natural specimens into elaborate landscapes and objects, giving OddWay a strong indoor geology-and-outsider-art stop.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums33.4712° N, 81.9613° W
Augusta, GA
A modern revival of the old dime-museum tradition displays sideshow-style oddities, unusual artifacts, art and curiosities in downtown Augusta. Visits can require advance arrangement, so this is a check-ahead stop rather than a guaranteed walk-in museum.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums41.2637° N, 72.9975° W
Orange, CT
PEZ's Connecticut visitor center holds the world's largest public collection of PEZ memorabilia, a giant dispenser and windows into the working candy factory. It turns one of the world's strangest candy-delivery systems into a full museum stop.
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- Open to visitors
- Museums48.3606° N, 107.8671° W
Malta, MT
A local museum mixing homestead and regional history with fossil displays from an area famous for Late Cretaceous discoveries.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums46.6709° N, 85.9847° W
Grand Marais, MI
Cartoonist William Donahey received this barrel-shaped cottage in the 1920s, inspired by the tiny barrel homes in his Teenie Weenies comic strip. The restored structure now operates seasonally as a museum and looks exactly like two giant wooden pickle barrels joined together.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums38.4664° N, 91.7715° W
Linn, MO
Where Pigs Fly Farm contains a huge collection of pig-related objects alongside a working rescue farm. The organization describes it as America's only pig museum, making the property a deliberately eccentric collection stop with current weekend public hours.
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- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums36.0849° N, 115.1717° W
Las Vegas, NV
A huge playable collection of vintage pinball and arcade machines, including decades of coin-operated oddities that are preserved by a nonprofit museum.
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- Open to visitors
- Museums43.8861° N, 100.7070° W
Murdo, SD
This sprawling roadside collection contains classic automobiles, motorcycles, tractors, antique machinery and rooms of unexpected historical objects. What began as a car collection grew into a multi-building time capsule of transportation and prairie life.
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- Seasonal or ticketed