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I spent an afternoon last week visiting two car museums that were very close together in location and very similar in terms of collection philosophy. The Millbury Classic Cars and Truck Museum in Millbury, Ohio, and Snook’s Dream Cars, located 26 miles south in Bowling Green, are each the offshoots of private collections passed on from father to son. While the Millbury focuses on vehicles from the 1960s and 1970s, Snook’s collection includes cars from the early auto age and prewar era. Because each assemblage of vehicles reflects the personal preferences and vision of each owner, it is not surprising that there are very few artifacts in either location that recognize women as participants in American automotive history. Fortunately, I discovered a few that made the trip to Ohio worthwhile.

The Millbury Classic Cars and Trucks Museum opened its doors in May 2024. It is a large structure consisting of three garages, each added on as the collection expanded. The museum is a family project; the owner’s mother-in-law helped with the wood staining on the walls, while his son helped locate cars to fill the collection. The museum is unique in that provenance is not a requirement for auto inclusion; in fact, the majority of the vehicles are not original but have been modified or customized in some way. Rather than rely on donations, most of the cars were acquired through auction. Because the cars were purchased rather than donated, the accompanying placards have a lot of technical information about the car, but no identification or stories of previous owners. The collection also includes a vast array of auto memorabilia, including gas pumps, signage, and toys. Replicas of movie cars are also a prime attraction. 

Women’s representation in the museum is primarily as mannequins, called upon to place an automobile in a particular cultural or historical moment in time. They are part of a family in a Scooby-Do Mystery Machine-themed 1974 Chevy G10 custom van; riding in the passenger seat of a 1975 Volkswagen Bus; sitting shotgun in the 1979 Pontiac Trans Am of Smokey and the Bandit fame. The only vehicle devoted to a woman is a replica of the yellow 1974 Plymouth Road Runner driven by the fictional character Daisy Duke in the Dukes of Hazzard television series. A group of mannequins ‘for sale’ featured a dark haired woman in a racing suit, no doubt a salute to Danica Patrick.

Snook’s Dream Cars was opened in 2002 with the goal of sharing ‘cars for all ages.’ The automobiles on display are all in working condition; the museum’s on-staff mechanic gave us a short tour of the four-bay shop for maintaining collector cars within the building. The museum features a recreated 1940s era Texaco gas station, a showroom of extensive automobile memorabilia, and a car collection presented within period scenes ranging from a 1930s general store to a racetrack from the 1960s. The car collection consists of models from the 1930s, and includes coupes, convertibles, sedans, roadsters, and race cars.

Women were represented in the museum as important historical markers, such as the year in which Amelia Earhart disappeared, as well as the year in which Lyn St James became the first female rookie of the year at Indy. Two of the vehicles with female connections were a 1933 Cadillac owned by Mary Clark of the Kimberly-Clark Company, and a 1954 Kaiser-Darrin. As noted on an accompanying poster, ‘[Henry J.] Kaiser’s wife loved the look of Darrin’s sports car, and convinced her husband to go with the design for a limited production’, which suggests she had a significant amount of automotive influence over her husband.

Stereotypes of women drivers were found on the covers of automotive magazines on display, as well as assorted print advertisements in the ‘for sale’ bin. Symbolic women were also present as hood ornaments and award figures. 

While there weren’t as many representations of women in the two Ohio museum as I had expected, I am hoping that delving deeper into the artifact origins will provide some new insight into women’s automotive history.

While on a recent trip to Phoenix to capture some Cactus League spring training games, I made a visit to the Martin Auto Museum. The Martin Museum is located in an older strip mall, in a building that felt like it was a supermarket or discount store in a previous life. The museum features over 170 vehicles, including classic cars, hot rods, customs, and imports. It also contains a fair amount of auto memorabilia, signage, and a few antique gas pumps. The museum was founded by Mel Martin as a means to share his expanding collection and to ‘pass down his sizeable amount of knowledge to the generations that follow.’

The Martin Auto Museum is very focused on education; its website provides automotive history lesson plans for grades one through twelve. Younger grades are encouraged to create personal and family automotive histories through scrapbooking. Automotive history is incorporated into higher grade levels, with topics that include automobile types, automotive safety, the Arsenal of Democracy, the assembly line, as well as the representation of cars in song, film, art, and literature. The focus on education is clearly evident in the automobiles on display, as each is accompanied by a lengthy and often technical description of the car. While this practice allows for the dissemination of automotive knowledge, it lacks the personal stories that often accompany old cars. Consequently, the displays are somewhat sterile, as there is little opportunity for the visitor to connect to the car in a personal way. This focus on the technical rather than the personal eliminates any possibility of recognizing women’s relationship to cars. Without this social connection, the featured women in the Martin Museum exhibits are limited to famous women, women with relationships to famous men, women in motorsports, and unidentified women in photographs and film.

The woman who receives the most attention is Bertha Benz. Benz and her car, an 1886 Benz Motorwagen [replica], are featured in nearly every automotive museum I have visited. The attention is well deserved, as Benz, whose dowry financed the automotive enterprise of her husband Karl, drove the Patent-Motorwagen No. 3 on the first long-distance internal combustion engine [ICE] road trip to demonstrate the automobile’s feasibility and well as to garner publicity for Karl’s growing company. Greta Garbo is featured in two displays, as an owner [along with Mae West] of a 1930 Duesenberg Model J Torpedo Convertible as well as a 1925 Lincoln Model L. As the Lincoln placard reads, the photo ‘captures the elegance and timeless beauty of both the car and the actress.’ The conflation of characteristics of women and cars is a common promotional technique. The 1933 Buick Series 90 Limousine, formerly owned by Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, is also on display. The description which accompanies the vehicle includes links to further information not only of the car, but also the lovely queen. 

Popular culture connections include the custom car created for the film The Late Show which co-starred Lily Tomlin. The Cars & Stars Trivia video display features stills from famous car movies; unidentified female stars appear in scenes from American Graffiti, The Italian Job, Thelma and Louise, Fast and Furious, and Rebel Without a Cause.

The other category of women on display in the museum are partners of important or famous men. Photos of the founder’s supportive wife Sallie are found on walls and in glass cases. The female partners of rockabilly star Garlin Hackney and American ‘rodder’ Dain Gingerelli are also pictured but not always identified.

While the descriptions that accompany the cars often suffer from TMI [too much information], there were two vehicles that included no information whatsoever. Two midget cars on display had the names of what could be presumed to be the female drivers and/or crew team painted on the sides; however, there was no information about the cars or the women who raced them. Perhaps this was an exhibit in progress; however in its current state it appears as a missed opportunity to include women in the museum’s automotive history offerings.

Unlike the majority of museums, Martin visitors are invited to sit in the most of the cars which provides the opportunity to pose for photos. I found myself behind the wheel of a 1964 Ford Thunderbird convertible doing my best Thelma and Louise impression. This car is sponsored by a woman, but again, there is no information about the particular history of this vehicle so we are left to wonder about the sponsor’s connection to the car.

The vehicles in the Martin Auto Museum are varied and beautifully restored. The museum’s policy of allowing visitors to sit behind the wheel is unique among the museums I have visited. However, the lack of personal stories attached to each car misses the opportunity to connect to museum visitors in nostalgic, engaging, and meaningful ways. And perhaps more significantly, it leaves women out of the driver’s seat.