Kentucky’s Weird, Wonderful Museums
From the sublime to the hilarious

ARE you a "saver"? Can’t bear to throw anything away? You’re not alone. Clayton Wells, proprietor of the Swamp Valley General Store and Museum near Mt. Sterling, has been "preserving history" ever since he was a kid, and his seven buildings packed to the gills with paraphernalia.

"I just always hung on to everything," he explains.

Wells can fill your ears with fascinating stories about nearly every piece as you wind your way through the John Popkin’s Civil War Home, the Cheese Parlor, the Photo Silo, the Doctor’s Office, the Workshop, the Guest House and the Buggy Shed. In each you’ll see antiques of every ilk – a few of which are for sale – tin toys, collections of old medical instruments and pocket knives, a real Wells Fargo coach, a huge old ship’s lamp from the Carpathian, a Civil War-era film projector, family school photos, Victrolas, classic radios and old telephones.

One of the latter is the very first ever made, called "the Cordless Phone." Powered by sulphuric acid, this one-of-a-kind model was invented in Murray, Kentucky – known to many as "the birthplace of radio" – by Nathan Stubblefield and Rainey T. Wells. A fellow named Marconi stole the patent and Wells has official papers from the U. S. Patent Office to prove it.

A fine old-time Bluegrass musician himself, Wells has a slew of instruments, many of them given to him by "Hee Haw" cast members who shot a movie on his property in 1988. The thing about all his gadgets – be they musical or technological – is that they all seem to still work. I was treated to an impromptu concert when the maestro plunked himself down at a lovely old pump organ and cranked out a rousing Sunday-go-to-meeting hymn.

Old photographs of famous relatives stare severely from the walls – Edmund Wells, founder of Morgan County, and Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry among them – as do members of the Hatfield and McCoy clans.

The Patton Museum of Cavalry and Armor

Not all of Kentucky’s myriad of unusual museums can save your marriage. Some will provide fodder for your brain. Some will make you flat-out split your sides laughing, while others will breathe life into history and whiz you back in time.

For instance, you can look through a periscope for a tank’s eye view of the Battle at Kasserine Pass, ogle an intricate tactical chart of the Desert Storm ground war, and test your reflexes on an interactive tank simulator at the Patton Museum of Cavalry & Armor at Fort Knox.

Established to preserve historical material concerning cavalry and armor, this collection is one of the Army’s largest. Open year-round, it has enough real tanks to thrill even the most hardcore military buff.

In the Vehicle Park, 19 tanks and a Bell helicopter stand well- preserved and ready for inspection.

The Commanders Wall welcomes visitors inside, where limited edition prints and biographies of General George S. Patton, Major Gen. Israel Tal, Gen. Creighton W. Abrahms and Gen. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel pay tribute to these famous leaders.

A well-illustrated display of the history of mobile warfare culminates with master military strategist and tactician, Alexander the Great. A video continues the time line through the role of cavalry, from the Revolutionary War to the premiere of tanks and the eventual marriage of land and air forces for today’s powerful armor.

Displays packed with uniforms, wartime photos, tanks, helicopters, anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns, rocket launchers and a two-ton 6 x 6 Army truck illustrate every modern war. There’s even a section of the Berlin Wall in the Checkpoint Charlie exhibit.

Patton’s many personal effects include a walking stick made from the first tree felled in France by an American tank, and an exquisite sword collection. A life-like wooden statue carved to his exact physical dimensions stands next to his shiny, Army-green 1938 Series 75 Cadillac limousine.

The Vent Haven Museum

In Northern Kentucky a museum pays homage to much smaller carved wooden men. Known as "the Mecca of ventriloquism," Fort Mitchell’s Vent Haven Museum houses the largest known collection of ventriloquist’s material in the world. Joining over 500 dummies are numerous novelty items and memorabilia – talking canes, hand-carved miniature figures, drinking glasses and other ventriloquist (or vent) props. There’s a grandfather clock that turns into a dummy and a talking painting. A library boasts hundreds of volumes on ventriloquism, how-to courses, sheet music, scripts, vintage playbills and broadsides, tapes, records and films.

Why Ft. Mitchell? Because it was the home of W. S. Berger, an early 1900s businessman who was entranced when he saw his first vent, Harry "the Great" Lester, in a New York vaudeville show. An ensuing friendship with Lester inspired Berger to meet most of the world’s vents, with whom he corresponded for about 60 years.

By the ’30s he’d started a collection of memorabilia, to which many retiring performers donated or willed their paraphernalia. Ten years prior to his death, Berger set up a trust fund to preserve his unusual ephemera for future generations.

The National Corvette Museum

You’ll find a mix of the future and the past at the National Corvette Museum, right across the street from the world’s only Corvette Assembly Plant.

Designed to emulate the cars’ sweeping lines, the museum is crowned by a striking yellow conical roof and red 12-story spire and houses more than 50 Corvettes from 1953 on, including some one-of-a-kind production models.

You can sit in the driver’s seat of a new Corvette for a photo then soak up some sports car history in the 200-seat Chevrolet Theater. If you still harbor fond memories of roller-skating carhops and twistin’ with Chubby Checker, deja vu will grab you in Nostalgia Alley, where a live mechanic greets guests and vintage Corvettes line the streets. And you can drool over Sting Rays and Sharks in a dealership showroom.

In other areas you can see inside high horsepower engines and powertrains, watch a car evolve from the drawing board to a working prototype to an actual production model, or live vicariously through "Wall of Fame" photos of famous Corvette owners with their beloved vehicles.

Sip a cold pop, shake a leg at a sock hop or just hobnob with other "gear heads" at monthly Cruise Night, May through October. And be sure to buy a chance to win a Millennium Yellow Corvette Convertible before the museum’s fourth annual fund raising Labor Day raffle.

The National Scouting Museum

If you win, you can drive in style farther west, all the way to Murray State University, where the National Scouting Museum sits smack on the college campus.

As the official museum of the Boy Scouts of America, this facility is a treasure trove of information focused on youth. There’s a three-screen theater with shows highlighting modern scouting, interactive video games, a NASA space capsule, history-telling robots, an adventure maze with a grizzly and rattlesnake, a knot-tying station where Scouts and former Scouts can show off or brush up on their skills, and an outside ropes course that individuals and teams can reserve for a nominal charge.

But the museum’s surprise is its collection of more than 50 original Norman Rockwell paintings. Beginning his career with the Boy Scouts as an illustrator of Boys Life in 1912, this universally-loved artist created one Scout-themed painting per year as a calendar cover for the Saturday Evening Post-era company Brown & Bigelow, from 1925 through 1976. Forty of these originals at a time are now on display during the museum’s March through November season.

The Harland Sanders Cafe and Museum

If you want to grab a crispy drumstick, there are few places today on the globe without a KFC. And its finger-lickin’ roots stretch all the way back to Eastern Kentucky, to the Harland Sanders Cafe and Museum in Corbin, where the Colonel perfected his "secret recipe."

Chock full of Kentucky Fried memorabilia, this combination eatery and history vault re-creates Sanders’ empire, from its humble beginnings on old Route 25 to the success that spawned his 1965 run for governor.

Steeped in Southern hospitality, a mannequin with his trademark goatee welcomes you into his old office, complete with a hamster cage and juke box that once played ’30s-era 78 rpm records. The old kitchen sports a 1940s dishwasher, grill and stove, original spices and the pressure cookers he used to fry those first tasty birds.

These days you can order your chicken in a computerized modern restaurant, then eat it in the back dining room on reproductions of the Colonel’s original furniture.

"It’s something how a man can take his Social Security check, open a restaurant and make a fortune, but that’s what the Colonel did," says Junior Wood, the restaurant’s assistant manager.

"It’s a real Kentucky success story."

Katherine Tandy Brown (kathybrown@lanereport.com) is a staff writer for The Lane Report.

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