What does it take to start a car museum?

Turns out, it only takes one car, a 1959 Cadillac Coupe De Ville in fact.  The ’59 Caddy isn’t just any old car; it was actually my grandpa’s car (Pop).  I felt so fortunate to own my Pop’s ’59 Cadillac, that I wanted to do absolutely everything I could with it.

I actually stayed up all night long the first night it was in my possession.  I was just finishing up the wheels when the rest of my family got up in the morning. My Pop’s car has its own website pops59.com, and its own Facebook page.  I had multiple articles written about the car, and it even graced the cover of a local magazine.

I took the car to as many car shows as possible but eventually, it got old, so I thought of a storage concept that would give me a place to park my huge car and still be able to share it with people while I wasn’t driving it.  This concept was just that; I had no money, no time, and only one car, but within a year, I had the opportunity to implement my concept, which would become Miles Through Time Automotive Museum.

In 2017, I created Miles Through Time Automotive Museum with only my Pop’s 1959 Cadillac in a tiny town in northeast Georgia.  My initial concept also included consignment as a way to get more vehicles on display, and my second car in the museum ended up being a 1927 Model T that belonged to the guy that installed my internet.

As it turns out, getting cars from other people was easy.  Having them pay for storage in a rural area was not, and consignment, when my passion was not selling cars, was a drag.  Nevertheless, I continued to work on growing the museum for three years.

If the museum was open, it was because I was there.  By the end of 2019, I had pretty much done all I could do in my current environment and had the opportunity to relocate the museum to a bigger place inside of a flea market.

I had planned to relocate the museum to its new location in the winter of 2019 and reopen in the spring of 2020, which required to essentially start over from scratch.  This time I had help from a guy named Truitt Phillips that embraced my concept from the beginning.

When we moved the museum, I turned Miles Through Time into a 501c3 nonprofit and made Truitt an Executive Director.  Truitt went full-steam ahead, and we built an entire replica western town in the new museum, including a replica of the original Phillips 66 filling station.

Our timing of moving the museum also coincided with COVID.  Despite everything going on in the world, Truitt and I continued to dredge on; and 2020 ended up having more visitors to the museum than the first three years combined.

We continued to pour everything back into the museum and quickly filled the space we had available again.  We also started having vehicles and memorabilia donated to the museum, which expanded the museum’s permanent collection.

In December of 2021, I took over the flea market we had moved the museum into and created Vintage Garage Antiques.  Although the antiques weren’t an original part of the plan, being inside of a flea market has its benefits.

Taking over the flea market enabled the museum to expand again, which almost doubled the size of the museum.  This also gave me the ability to control the entire experience for visitors instead of just once they entered the museum.

Today, the Miles Through Time Automotive Museum averages around 60 full-size vehicles on display that frequently change since most are on loan, many being family heirlooms.  There are also pedal cars, vintage bikes, airplanes, trains, and over 5,000 model cars on display.

There is also still no wealthy benefactor behind the museum.  Everything is made possible by museum admission and donations.  I still only own my Pop’s ’59 Caddy on display, but the museum does have some other cool vehicles that have been donated, like a 1958 Studebaker Golden Hawk, a concept car, and a 1935 Mathis, just to name a few.

It’s one thing to start a museum; it’s another to keep it open, and I’m constantly working on getting more people involved and doing my best to keep the museum a place people want to visit.  I did a lot of research to get the museum where it is today and created automotivemuseumguide.com from that research to help other museums get found and make it easy for visitors to find automotive museums all over North America.

I’ll be sharing other automotive museums in the future.  There are a lot of neat pieces of automotive history on display in places you can actually visit, and I’ll let you know where these places are.

Sean Mathis, Founder, Miles Through Time Automotive Museum