Everything OddWay knows about. Narrow it down by what you're after, or where you're going.
Small, specific collections run by people who care far too much.
Point Lookout, MO
The College of the Ozarks museum contains a sprawling collection of Ozarks material, but its most unexpected object is the original modified automobile used by the Clampett family on The Beverly Hillbillies. Firearms, antiques, natural history and regional collections surround the pop-culture centerpiece.
Petaluma, CA
Steve Sansweet's enormous private Star Wars collection holds hundreds of thousands of objects and can only be visited on scheduled guided tours; there are no public walk-in hours.
Fort Davis, TX
A small roadside reptile museum displaying live venomous snakes and other desert reptiles from the Southwest.
Richland, WA
Exhibits connect Ice Age floods, Columbia River ecology, Indigenous history, and the Hanford nuclear story. The combination of geology and atomic history makes it a useful context stop for several stranger destinations nearby.
Clinton, NJ
The striking red mill beside the South Branch Raritan River operated in several industrial roles before becoming the centerpiece of a historical museum complex. More than a dozen buildings and thousands of artifacts preserve the site's industrial and local history.
Gallup, NM
The museum at Red Rock Park combines regional archaeology, geology and cultural interpretation beneath towering red sandstone cliffs. Its setting makes the surrounding landscape part of the museum experience.
Watertown, SD
A monumental brick museum houses a large collection of Terry Redlin's nostalgic wildlife and rural paintings. The purpose-built center gives one commercial artist an unexpectedly grand, almost shrine-like presence along Interstate 29.
Washington, DC
The Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery specializes in American craft and often fills its historic building with immersive and unconventional installations.
Laredo, TX
A small museum in an 1830s building interprets the short-lived Republic of the Rio Grande and Laredo's border history.
Willcox, AZ
This compact museum is devoted to Willcox-born singing cowboy Rex Allen, preserving costumes, photographs, records and movie memorabilia. A nearby statue and the grave of Allen's horse Koko add to the town's unusually specific cowboy-celebrity landscape.
Hillsboro, OR
A former ranch house holds meteorites, petrified wood, fluorescent minerals, crystals and one of the Pacific Northwest's strongest public geology collections.
Grand Junction, CO
A short interpretive trail crosses two historic dinosaur quarry sites where Elmer Riggs and later crews worked the Morrison Formation. The hill preserves the story in the actual excavation landscape just outside Grand Junction.
Newport, OR
The Newport Odditorium packs shrunken curiosities, optical illusions, unusual artifacts and interactive exhibits into a long-running Bayfront attraction.
Orlando, FL
Tilted 'sinking' building packed with sideshow-style oddities and unusual artifacts.
St. Augustine, FL
Original permanent Ripley's museum inside a castle-like former hotel packed with unusual artifacts.
Roanoke, VA
The Roanoke Pinball Museum preserves dozens of playable machines tracing pinball from early mechanical games through modern electronic tables. Admission is built around actually playing the collection rather than viewing it behind glass, making it an interactive history of arcade technology.
Rock Island Arsenal, IL
One of the U.S. Army's oldest museums traces weapons, manufacturing, and the history of the active Rock Island Arsenal.
Woodland Park, CO
A fossil museum and working laboratory with mounted skeletons, marine reptiles and visible preparation work. The collection emphasizes real paleontology and casts from specimens prepared by the affiliated laboratory.
Colorado Springs, CO
A compact upstairs museum packed with early and mid-century motorcycles, racing history and rider memorabilia. Its free, volunteer-run collection is easy to miss from street level and unusually dense once inside.
Roebling, NJ
The former John A. Roebling's Sons factory site interprets the wire-rope company responsible for material used in famous suspension bridges including the Brooklyn and Golden Gate bridges. Industrial machinery, photographs and factory artifacts survive inside the company-town museum.
Fargo, ND
A small museum devoted to baseball star Roger Maris sits unexpectedly inside West Acres shopping mall. Memorabilia, video and recreated elements turn a retail corridor into a compact sports shrine.
Woonsocket, RI
The Rose Ferron Foundation preserves personal objects, devotional material and portions of an elaborate handmade Domestic Chapel connected to Marie "Little Rose" Ferron. The organization occupies a castle-like former commercial building at 339 Arnold Street and continues restoring the museum complex. Check ahead because renovation can affect what is open to visitors.
San Jose, CA
A museum founded by the Rosicrucian Order houses the largest collection of Egyptian artifacts on display in western North America inside an Egyptian-revival complex.
Roswell, NM
Vintage rockets, robots and space toys from the 1930s through the 1960s fill this downtown museum. The collection shows how science fiction and the Space Age were packaged for children long before Roswell's modern alien tourism boom.
