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.
Searsport, ME
A room-size camera obscura on the Penobscot Marine Museum campus is built to resemble an old box camera. Visitors can step inside and see a live, inverted image of the outside world projected through a small opening onto the interior surface. Museum: https://penobscotmarinemuseum.org/
Bangor, ME
This large transportation museum preserves an eclectic collection of Maine road, rail, military, farm, and commercial vehicles. Exhibits range from snowplows and fire engines to motorcycles, trains, military equipment, and historic machinery, making it much broader and stranger than a conventional car museum.
Bangor, ME
The unlikely star of the Bangor Police Museum is the Duck of Justice, a taxidermied wood duck rescued from a trash bin and transformed into the department’s internet-famous mascot. The small museum is inside the police department and is currently viewed by appointment.
Yarmouth, ME
Eartha is an enormous rotating globe installed inside the former DeLorme headquarters, now associated with Garmin. The three-story sphere turns slowly inside a glass atrium and can also be seen from outside the building.
Freeport, ME
A roughly 50-foot fin-whale skeleton nicknamed “Finny” hangs overhead inside Maine Beer Company’s Freeport facility. The enormous specimen turns a commercial stop into an unexpected natural-history display and was installed after the whale’s remains were recovered and prepared for exhibition.
South Paris, ME
This local library and museum occupies Oxford County’s former stone jail, giving visitors a chance to see historic cells alongside collections tied to the area and the Hamlin family. The unusual reuse leaves much of the old lockup atmosphere intact instead of disguising the building’s original purpose.
Boothbay, ME
Thousands of seashells from around the world fill a covered-bridge-style structure at the Dolphin Mini Golf property. The dense collection ranges from familiar Maine shells to exotic specimens and is generally tied to the property’s seasonal schedule.
Hinckley, ME
The L.C. Bates feels like an old-fashioned cabinet of curiosities preserved inside a museum, with historic taxidermy, minerals, fossils, cultural artifacts, dioramas, and unusual specimens. Among its stranger holdings are a marlin associated with Ernest Hemingway and a piece of early transatlantic cable.
Arundel, ME
This museum displays an eclectic collection of restored automobiles, motorcycles, automobilia, and unusual vehicles rather than focusing on a single make or era. Its highly visual collection makes it an easy OddWay stop even for travelers who are not dedicated car enthusiasts.
Jonesport, ME
This small Downeast museum preserves the vanished world of Maine’s sardine canneries through old tins, labels, photographs, machinery, packing tables, workers’ tools, and other industrial artifacts. One especially personal display preserves scissors once used by individual cannery workers.
Bethel, ME
This museum combines Maine mining history with an unusually strong meteorite collection, including material from the Moon and Mars. Its mix of gemstones, space rocks, and geological specimens makes it much stranger than a standard local-history museum.
Portland, ME
Historic two-foot-gauge railway equipment still operates along Portland’s waterfront, preserving a form of railroading once unusually common in Maine. The museum runs scheduled passenger trips in restored equipment rather than displaying the collection only as static artifacts.
Presque Isle, ME
The Sun inside Folsom Hall at the University of Maine at Presque Isle anchors a huge scale model of the solar system whose planetary installations stretch along roads through Aroostook County. Travelers can turn the model into its own multi-stop OddWay route.
Portland, ME
This specialized museum focuses entirely on beadwork as art, craft, and cultural expression. Exhibitions range from contemporary pieces to traditions from different communities, creating a museum around a material that is usually relegated to a small section elsewhere.
Owls Head, ME
This working transportation museum preserves early aircraft, automobiles, motorcycles, engines, and other machines, with many exhibits maintained in operating condition. Demonstrations and special events can make the collection feel more like a living mechanical time capsule than a static museum.
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.
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.
Kennebunkport, ME
The Seashore Trolley Museum preserves a huge collection of historic streetcars, buses, rapid-transit vehicles, and other public transportation equipment. Seasonal operating days can include rides aboard restored railway vehicles.
Kingfield, ME
The Stanley family produced far more than the famous Stanley Steamer automobile. This museum explores their steam cars alongside photography, early airbrush technology, violins, and other inventions connected to a remarkably inventive Maine family.
Wilton, ME
The Wilton Farm and Home Museum displays a life-size figure of Sylvia Hardy, a Maine woman who stood more than seven and a half feet tall and later toured with P.T. Barnum’s shows. The exhibit includes one of Hardy’s actual dresses, making her extraordinary height much easier to comprehend.
Ellsworth, ME
This hands-on museum preserves working switchboards, telephone exchanges, switching systems, and equipment spanning generations of communication technology. Its limited seasonal schedule and appointment options make it a check-ahead stop rather than a spontaneous year-round visit.
South Bristol, ME
This preserved ice house keeps alive the pre-refrigeration practice of cutting large blocks of natural pond ice during winter and storing them under insulating sawdust. Special events still demonstrate traditional ice harvesting using old tools and techniques.
Trenton, ME
Timber Tina’s outdoor show turns traditional lumberjack skills into a competitive performance featuring axe throwing, log rolling, chopping, sawing, and other old logging-camp techniques. It has the feel of a surviving piece of exaggerated North Woods culture performed live rather than preserved behind museum glass.
Peaks Island, Portland, ME
This tiny museum is devoted entirely to umbrella sleeves and covers collected from around the world. Reaching it requires a ferry ride to Peaks Island, and its operating schedule is seasonal.
