Visiting the Miracle of America Museum was one of the highlights of our visit to Montana. This is a huge museum and the outside displays you can see without charge, if you want to tour the indoor displays the admission is nominal. Group tours are available.
The Miracle of America Museum is the largest collection of antiques and artefacts in Montana.
Gil & Joanne Mangels founded the Miracle of America Museum in 1981 and are still passionate about it today. The day we were there Gil was always eager to answer all your questions. The museum came about as a result of Gil's addiction to collecting. He collected a bit of everything and before he knew it he had enough "Stuff" collected that the next obvious step was to open a museum and share his collection with the world. We're glad he did!
Miracle of America Museum
POLSON - You probably couldn't see every item at the Miracle of America Museum here if you tried, everything from ancient beauty salon hair dryers to a Huey helicopter, from a 1928 Harley Davidson JD motorcycle to a forerunner of the snowmobile, a 1943 Eliason Motor Toboggan.
There are old lawnmowers, sewing machines, saddles, guns, bicycles, toys, outboard motors, jet planes, spark plugs, sheet music, farm tools, postcards, phonographs, cars, boats, Viking ships, soda fountains …
… Wait a minute. A Viking ship?
Well, it sure looks like one, up there on a hill behind the museum.
On closer inspection, the "Viking ship" is an old lifeboat to which someone has attached a bunch of old car hubcaps, out of which and into the sky rise oars.
It's all part of the fun of the museum: Finding, amid the tens of thousands of legitimate items that clutter its dozens of buildings and grounds, the ones that aren't so real.
For instance, the treadmill on which stands a sheep? It's real. (The treadmill, not the stuffed sheep.) Back in the day, museum co-founder Gil Mangels explains, farmers used animal power to create machine power.
In this case, the treadmill powered a cream separator. A farmer would put a sheep (or dog) on the treadmill, tie it to the front, then lower the rear of the treadmill so the animal was on an incline. The animal either had to keep walking, and keep the cream separator working, or n if the sheep or dog came to a stop n have the rope tighten around its neck as it slid off the back of the treadmill.
But one of the many motorcycles on display isn't so real. The handlebars are steer horns, the tires are old circular stones once used to sharpen farm tools, the taillight is a red candle and the horn is a duck you squeeze to make it quack. The Fred Flintstone Cycle, like the Viking ship, is one of the 20 or so fake items scattered among the more than 130,000 n that's right, 130,000-plus n real ones.
And the mind behind them is Mangels, who, along with wife Joanne, started the Miracle of America Museum more than 25 years ago.
"You don't have to be crazy," Mangels says. "But it helps."
Read on at the Missoulian