The Continent’s Largest Car Museum Is Hiding in West Michigan

Hickory Corners — Down a few roads that aren’t plowed very well in the middle of February, past fading barns, rural homes, a few churches, and a lot of quiet fields is the most incredible collection of cars you will ever lay your eyes on.

Here, in Hickory Corners, in the middle of nowhere, where you would never go unless you knew where to go, is the Gilmore Car Museum, the largest automobile museum in all of North America. I’m not exaggerating when I say the middle of nowhere. According to the 2020 census, Hickory Corners has a population of 313. The Gilmore Car Museum has a (car) population of over 400.

Hickory Corners is more car than it is human.

The Gilmore Car Museum began in the early 1960s. The early collection started with Donald S. Gilmore’s own personal set of old cars. He had a 1913 Rolls Royce, a 1920 Pierce Arrow, and a 1927 Ford Model T. He himself restored the Arrow and it inspired him to expand his collection.

Not long after, he bought 90 acres of land in Hickory Corners. He grew his collection and the Gilmore Car Museum opened to the public on July 31, 1966. The museum today includes a sprawling 209,100 square feet of exhibit space found in a collection of buildings situated on well-manicured grounds. Turning off sleepy Hickory Road and into Gilmore Car Museum feels a little like approaching a rural estate.

The main entrance to the museum is a beautiful brick building called the Gilmore Heritage Center. Though this specific building was built in 2011, it doesn’t look like it. It’s beautiful, classic, and just lovely. People build a lot of—if you will excuse me—really stupid buildings these days. Ugly designs that try too hard to be modern and end up feeling uninhabitable, cold, and dull. It’s truly refreshing when you encounter something better, and the Gilmore Heritage Center is certainly that. It’s extremely well done architecture that complements the purpose, content, and spirit of the museum wonderfully.

Inside, past the front desk where you pay $20 to get in, is a full-blown time warp. Organized by era and maker, there’s cars from the 80s, the 60s, the 40s, the 20s and everything else between and before. Muscle cars, cars that remind you of JFK, cars that feel like The Great Gatsby, and cars that ran on steam way back in the late 1800s.

I’m not a real car guy. I don’t have a cool car, though I certainly would if I had extra money. I don’t work on cars. I don’t know all the names of all the different models or all the intricacies of what exactly makes one car so much better mechanically than another car. But seeing all these cars just perfectly maintained and immaculately restored in one place, bumper to bumper, is really quite the experience. It’s one thing seeing old cars in photos, but it’s really very different seeing them with your own eyes.

How low some of the cars sat, how long they were, what those midcentury taillights were really like. I stood there and I could understand more than I ever can when I’m looking at a photo on my phone. Getting to look in the windows and gaze at the dashboards. Remember the dashboards? No bluetooth, no screens, nothing digital. Dials, arms, lighters, and everything analog. Those were really different days.

Seeing the really old ones put a different kind of perspective on my plate. They aren’t accessible like the cars from the 60s and 70s. I’ve ridden in those cars and they are somewhat understandable even though they come from such a different time. But the really old ones—the Gatsby ones, the WW1-era ones, and the rickety ones from before I even knew there were cars—those really feel like a different world.

Some of them were so grand, they were like chariots. Looking at them with their wicker baskets, lights that look like lanterns, tires that seem like they belong on wagons, and broad swooping metal I felt a completely different essence of what those cars mean and the era in which they were built.

Standing next to a Chrysler Town & Country from 1942 practically took my breath away, and that’s really not an exaggeration. There’s real wood on those doors and when you are 3 inches away from it you really know what that means. It’s not fake panelling, it’s not printed, it’s not flimsy. It’s real, beautiful, glossy, finished wood. That car is just a beautiful work of art and a glimpse into a different world.

That’s one of the deep takeaways from the cars in the Gilmore Car Museum. You can feel the spirit of the eras in which each one of them was built. The years on the plaque in front of them perfectly correspond to the feeling you get as you look over them. They all say something about the world in which they were built.

In some tragic sense the museum is depressing because the cars we drive to the museum are so much uglier than any of the cars we see in the museum. The Gilmore Car Museum reminds us of how less beautiful our time is. Yes, our cars include all of this comfortable technology that the olds ones never had, but they sure are hideous or just kind of lame.

But it’s not depressing in the very end. The Gilmore Car Museum is inspiring. Look at the cars we built. Look how beautiful they were. And yes, look at the incredible advancements and developments that occurred from, say, 1900 to 1975. Standing beside them and looking at them in all their glory is a reminder of human creativity and human ingenuity, and that our built world doesn’t need to be as ugly as it is.

It reminds us that the modern world can be beautiful, and it can be beautiful again.