Museums29.8911° N, 81.3141° W
St. Augustine, FL
Taxidermy lion with an unusual Winston Churchill connection inside an already eccentric Gilded Age collection.
- Access
- 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.
- Museums40.0438° N, 86.9017° W
Crawfordsville, IN
Built around a rotating circular cell block, Crawfordsville's 1882 jail used a hand-cranked mechanism to bring individual cells to the only opening. The preserved structure is now a museum and is notable as the only surviving rotary jail whose cell block can still be operated.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums39.7859° N, 75.5806° W
Wilmington, DE
Hagley preserves nearly 5,000 nineteenth-century patent models — tiny working proofs once required with U.S. patent applications. About 100 are displayed in the library, creating a room full of miniature Victorian inventions, mechanisms and forgotten ideas.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums60.9617° N, 149.0806° W
Girdwood, AK
Alaska's only mountaintop museum occupies the historic Roundhouse at the upper tram terminal on Mount Alyeska. The octagonal ski building preserves Girdwood and resort history at an elevation reached by aerial tram rather than ordinary street access.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums40.2602° N, 89.2314° W
Atlanta, IL
A compact museum of vintage coin-operated amusements preserves old pinball machines, arcade games, mechanical devices, and roadside entertainment history.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums34.9443° N, 104.7027° W
Santa Rosa, NM
Dozens of restored classic cars, hot rods, signs and Route 66 memorabilia fill this roadside museum. The collection fits Santa Rosa's position as one of the better-preserved automobile-culture stops on the historic highway.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Museums39.7130° N, 89.6474° W
Springfield, IL
A restaurant and museum complex crams vintage race cars, neon, pumps, signs, engines, and Route 66 artifacts into a former truck stop.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums35.1823° N, 83.3789° W
Franklin, NC
Hidden inside a long-running gem shop is a free museum packed with minerals, fossils, artifacts, skulls, and unusual specimens. Highlights have included an enormous sapphire, a huge amethyst, fossilized dinosaur coprolite, and a purported shrunken head. Location: https://www.visitsmokies.org/listings/ruby-city-gems-minerals/
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Museums48.5632° N, 110.5550° W
Rudyard, MT
A restored railroad depot and small-town museum complex combining homestead artifacts, vintage vehicles, local history, and dinosaur material from the Hi-Line.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums35.4916° N, 92.0326° W
Heber Springs, AR
A small railroad museum preserves local train artifacts, model displays and rail history in Heber Springs. It is an offbeat, enthusiast-run transportation stop.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums45.8902° N, 95.3781° W
Alexandria, MN
The museum displays the controversial Kensington Runestone, whose inscription claims a fourteenth-century Norse presence in Minnesota. Most professional runic scholars and historians regard the stone as a much later creation, making the artifact as interesting for the debate around it as for the carving itself.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums41.7292° N, 85.8799° W
Elkhart, IN
Elkhart's RV/MH Hall of Fame preserves historic recreational vehicles ranging from primitive camping trailers to elaborate motorhomes. Walking through decades of changing interiors and technology makes the collection feel like a timeline of increasingly strange mobile living spaces.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Museums44.2594° N, 86.3150° W
Manistee, MI
Built in 1930, the City of Milwaukee carried railroad cars across Lake Michigan before being preserved as a museum ship. Guided tours pass through the working spaces and steep stairways of the old car ferry; the 2026 regular tour season ended August 30, so fall access should be checked before routing here.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums36.4078° N, 93.7242° W
Eureka Springs, AR
Located at the Great Passion Play complex, the Sacred Arts Museum houses a large collection of religious artworks and artifacts. It is a distinctive companion stop to the giant Christ of the Ozarks statue.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums27.9905° N, 82.6891° W
Safety Harbor, FL
Local museum built near ancient shell mounds and focused on Tocobaga and regional history.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums40.4649° N, 79.9837° W
Pittsburgh, PA
Saint Anthony Chapel in Troy Hill houses more than 5,000 religious relics, one of the largest publicly accessible collections outside the Vatican. The active Catholic chapel is open during posted hours, and visitors can see reliquaries containing remains and objects associated with hundreds of saints.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Museums42.5222° N, 70.8909° W
Salem, MA
A small museum explores Ouija boards, spirit communication and talking-board history through vintage boards and related objects. It gives Salem a paranormal stop centered on Spiritualism and commercial occult culture rather than the 1692 trials.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums35.7162° N, 83.5025° W
Gatlinburg, TN
Tens of thousands of salt and pepper shakers fill this small museum, arranged by subject, era and design. The obsessive scale of the collection turns an ordinary tabletop object into one of Gatlinburg's most genuinely eccentric museums.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Museums43.1000° N, 76.2070° W
Liverpool, NY
Built beside Onondaga Lake in 1933, this small museum preserves the story of the salt industry that gave nearby Syracuse its nickname, the Salt City. Exhibits explain brine wells, boiling blocks and salt production, with free public hours running seasonally from May into October.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums32.7312° N, 117.1487° W
San Diego, CA
Large operating layouts recreate Southwestern railroads in painstaking miniature, filling an unusually large museum devoted almost entirely to model trains.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Museums42.7508° N, 95.5517° W
Cherokee, IA
This unusually broad small-city museum combines archaeology, geology, regional history and astronomy beneath one roof. Its planetarium and strong archaeological collections give it more range than most local museums.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Museums38.2726° N, 85.7414° W
Jeffersonville, IN
The Schimpff family has operated this downtown candy business at its present site since 1891. Its museum preserves antique candy equipment, packaging and memorabilia, and visitors can often watch candy being made on machinery that looks almost as unusual as the collection itself.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Museums35.1821° N, 83.3796° W
Franklin, NC
The only museum of its kind in the United States is devoted to tartans, kilts, Highland dress, weaving, Scottish weaponry, and Scottish migration to the Carolinas. Its collection includes centuries-old tartan samples and hundreds of patterns.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Museums44.3054° N, 68.4042° W
Tremont, ME
This Mount Desert Island museum concentrates on automobiles and motorcycles from the earliest decades of motoring, including exceptionally old and unusual vehicles. Period accessories and devices help show just how experimental road travel looked before modern cars became standardized.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed