I love how they have a picture of a girl licking the salt wall on their homepage.
That reminds me of when a chemistry prof passed around a big huge crystal of halite, prefaced by warning us how many students of his had licked that crystal over the years.
I really wanted to check out the Nutcracker Museum in Leavenworth WA when I was in the area, but there was some kind of cycling event going on and there was absolutely nowhere to park in town. Oh well, maybe next time.
There’s the famous Mutter Museum of 19th/early 20th century medical oddities.
And Edward Gorey’s actual house is now a museum of his works.
There was a telephone museum in Springfield IL (now closed, it seems) which I found interesting as a former Western Electric person. There appear to be lots of others.
Not small but specialized is the Coca Cola Museum in Atlanta, which has the benefit of at least a hundred varieties of soda (all free) from around the world.
There is the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto.
I’ve sadly missed the Chimney Sweep Museum when I was in Vienna.
Been there, really cool.
The Pharmacy Museum in New Orleans was interesting too.
Just a few miles west of Toledo there is a Popcorn Museum. Mostly popcorn machines, like in theaters, but also a section of history of popcorn, varities, etc. Worth half an hour.
The Museum for Cultural and Military History Grafenwoehr. It’s a museum for the community that’s only got a couple thousand resident and a large military training area. That’s small but not as highly specialized as the collection that is it’s big draw. It’s got a pretty decent Elvis collection. Specifically, that chunk of the collection is dedicated to Elvis’ time in the US Army.
R. E. Olds Transportation Museum. It’s a museum mostly dedicated to the history of one of the pioneers in auto manufacturing and assembly line production techniques. There’s some bits added to flesh out the collection with other ties to transportation tech and manufacturing in the Lansing, MI area. Mostly it’s a museum about Oldsmobile.
I found out this was a thing due to a mid-century recipe blogger www.midcenturymenu.com
some of the stuff she posted from her trip there was interesting in a historical sort of way
I once visited the Cockroach Museum in Plano, Texas. Was really just a pest control shop where the owner took cockroach corpses and put them in dioramas that were based on movie scenes and stuff like that. But it got him on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
Last I heard he had retired and moved away, not sure if he still made the “museum” available anywhere.
That’s an excellent museum, I’ve been there a couple of times and there’s a lot to learn about history and culture.
One place to avoid is the Salem Witch Museum. There are good museums in Salem, like the Peabody Essex, but the Salem Witch Museum is a tourist trap and not a real museum at all.
I’m not sure this really counts, since it’s impossible to classify what this place actually is, but it’s interesting and worth a visit:
THE MUSEUM of JURASSIC TECHNOLOGY
When I was a young teen in the early '70’s, my friend insisted an obscure museum (that he didn’t know the name of) had the mummified penis of Napoleon. I kept telling him how ridiculous that until one day he told me found out the name. Arnie’s, located in Waikiki, Hawaii.
We went and it was a torture museum featuring the history of torture devices, including wax statues. The only one I remember being a guy flayed alive with strips of flesh hanging form his back. It was bizarre and interesting, but I kept asking “Where was the penis?”. Then, almost near the end, there it was, Napoleon’s penis, clearly marked as such! It was dried up and shriveled, in a cloth lined wooden box, recognizable as a penis! We continued through the museum and my friend proudly proclaimed we really saw Napleon’s penis. I, on the other had kept insisting how ridiculous it was that 1) it was really a penis and not just a ‘something’ that resembled a penis and 2) if it was real, why would it have to be Napoleon’s and 3) how did it end up in an obscure museum in Hawaii? How silly!
I just did a Google search and just found out that 1) Napoelon’s penis WAS supposedly cut off and preserved, 2) was in a wooden box similar to what I remember seeing, 3) was confirmed to be a real penis, though not confirmed to be Napoleon’s and 4) was bought by a private collector in 1977 with no history of how it got to the auction. Maybe I DID see Napeolen’s penis!
I came in to mention this, which I briefly consider every time I drive past it on the way up to Bideford. The road also goes past Gnome World, but that appears to be a camp ground with some gnomes, rather than a Gnome museum, so I know not to go there.
My favourite pair of shoes in the Bata Shoe Museum is a giant pair of straw snow boots used by some Japanese islanders to stomp paths through snow drifts.
On a road trip to upstate New York, I somehow convinced my friends into making a side trip to the Kazoo Museum in Eden, New York. It was small, but kind of interesting.
If you’re in Gatlinburg, TN, you can visit the Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum.
Many years ago there was a rare stone collection/museum in Singapore. As soon as I heard of it I was keen to go, my S’porean friends went with, but kept implying it wasn’t likely to be what I was expecting. And they were right! I was expecting rare gems and minerals, lots of carved jade maybe. But it wasn’t that at all.
It was a vast collection of stones and rocks with inclusions that looked like something. All of the numbers, Chinese characters, the entire Roman alphabet! Then numerous animals and combinations of animals, sea creatures, you name it, they had it! Even landscapes and pictorials. It was freaking amazing. These were numerous combined large collections from various sources, but it must have taken ages upon ages to collect them. It’s gone now. I can’t help wondering where?
25+ yrs ago we were staying in Jogjakarta, in Indonesia, and finding it a really lovely city to visit. We’d become fast friends with a bejak driver, (think rickshaw, pedaled from behind!), who’d shown us all the charms of his city. We’d done the water palaces, temples, museums, markets but were still hanging about enjoying our stay. And we wanted to keep paying the driver so when he said there was a museum not in any of the books, we were all over it! He took us a long way to a monstrosity of a decaying colonial building. Inside was an enormous jumble of collected, and preserved samples of wildlife from the jungles and oceans nearby. Most preserved in glass jars. Giant bugs by the hundreds, unimaginable sea creatures. And then there was the bad taxidermy, everywhere you looked, primates, giant snakes and spiders, etc, etc. A truly shocking representation of how packed the place was with all manner of living critters. Some walls were covered in old newspaper clippings of giant creatures pulled from the sea, etc! All of it was packed into two huge halls, every surface was covered, both rooms jammed with ancient cabinets crammed with the stuff. Also, it was absolutely overrun with schoolchildren, mostly under 10 yrs. old. And they were milling and running and loud. It was awesome in every possible way!
There’s a sign on a road I sometimes cycle on that says “Rice Museum, next left” or something like that. I’ve long wondered why there’d be a museum about rice in Hillsboro Oregon, and this thread made me look it up. Of course, it’s not about rice, but rather rocks. Kind of humdrum for this thread, though.