Ohio has a huge multitude of museums of all shapes, sizes, colors and creeds, with features ranging from art and history to polka and carousels.
This is just a small sampling of what our fair state has to offer.
Snook’s Dream Cars
Bowling Green
A trip through Snook’s Dream Cars is a cruise through the past.
At its heart is the impressive collection of vintage cars owned by namesakes Bill and Jeff Snook, but the museum offers an immersive automotive experience, taking guests through scenes from the past such as a recreation of a 1940s Texaco station and a look at vintage downtown Bowling Green, complete with era-appropriate cars.
“We kind of have a time progression from the 1920s up through the early-mid 1960s in our race car scenes,” says Terry Stetler, chief mechanic for Snook’s.
The Snook’s showroom is home to some 30 cars from the same five-decade range, all of them in working condition; they’re often driven around town in the summer. A 1931 Ford Model A Roadster, a 1954 Kaiser Darrin 161 and a 1963 Jaguar XKE are just a small sample of the extensive collection.
Toy & Plastic Brick Museum
Bellaire
When Dan Brown decided a massive collection of Legos for display would make a good retirement project, he says, no pun intended, “Things just fell into place.”
The Toy & Plastic Brick Museum – also known as the Unofficial Lego Museum – started out as a means to show off Brown’s hoard of toys, but Legos quickly took over, he says. Today, the 36,000-square-foot museum, housed in a former elementary school, is the world’s largest private collection of Legos.
Some of the pieces – which include animatronics, robotics and traditional Lego structures – are submitted by Lego enthusiasts, some by the Lego company itself. There’s also a place for children to build their own Lego creations, and those looking to find a new home for their old Legos can send them to the museum for use in the children’s area.
Some of the most popular pieces include life-size Lego Darth Vader, Spider Man and Scooby-Doo, as well as a 6-foot-tall dragon and 9-foot-tall robot, both of which were featured A&E’s hit show Shipping Wars.
Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum
The Ohio State University campus
More than 3 million pieces of comic art are housed at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, the largest collection of its kind in the world.
The museum opened in 1977 with contents donated by cartoonist and The Ohio State University alumnus Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates, Steve Canyon) upon his retirement. Today, it boasts a diverse collection of comics, including mainstream superhero comics, newspaper comic strips, manga, cartoon animation and even some original cartoon art from the 1700s.
The museum portion has three galleries, two of which are rotating exhibitions – Will Eisner: 75 Years of Graphic Storytelling and The Long March: Civil Rights in Cartoons and Comics are on display now through Nov. 30 – and one of which is a permanent exhibition of major collection highlights.
Though the library portion is not open to the public because the valuable documents need to be kept in a stable environment, visitors can settle down in the reading room and ask assistants to pull whatever they want to look at.
Taylor Woodhouse is a contributing writer. Feedback welcome at gbishop@cityscenemediagroup.com.
