Wheels Through Time Museum
23. Oct, 2008 
6 Comments
One of my favorite tunes is “Time Machine” by Grand Funk Railroad and if you get a chance to visit the Wheels Through Time Museum in Maggie Valley, North Carolina you’ll think you had just stepped out of a time machine. The museum houses 275 vintage motorcycles in it’s exhibits. Also some great examples of vintage automobiles and tens of thousands of pieces of memorabilia are on display there.
What’s really extraordinary is that the machines in the museum are kept in operating condition. They are ready to roll and visitors to the museum are delighted when the staff fires up one of the old machines during the day. Some of the marques on display include but are not limited to Harley-Davidson, Indian. Excelsior, Henderson and Crocker. The oldest bike is a 1903 Indian.
The museum not only features street bikes but racing motorcycles too. There are some fine examples of the old boardtrack racers. Those crazy young men who raced motorcycles on wooden tracks with no brakes. I get nasty chills just thinking about wiping out on one of those tracks. There are also flat track and hill climbing machines to peruse for those who like those kinds of racing.
So you can see the Wheels Through Time Museum is worth the time in you’re really interested in vintage machinery. If you can’t make it to Maggie Valley you can go online and visit the museums “Time Machine”. There you can view exhibits and take a virtual tour of the museum. You can find it at www.wheelsthroughtime.com
Hell, I was in Maggie Valley a little over a year ago. I’m still kicking myself in the butt because I had no idea that the museum was there.
But I will be close enough again to it in July of ’09. I will make it a point to go and check it out.
Samuel,
Make sure that you check to see that the museum is still located there in July of 2009. Dale has announced his intention to move to a different location by then.
Man I want to check that out so bad now.
John,
(Mr Endrizzi) Thanks for the heads up. I should have known. That kind of crap always seems to happen to me. But I will keep a lookout and find out where the museum may be by then. Thanks again.
I hear it’s moving to Arizona. Spaztech mentioned it earlier, you might want to ask him if he knows where.
Just went to Wheels Through Time last week and saw their new exhibit on Police motorcycles. It’s an amazing place – gets better all the time. The facility is really more than simply a motorcycle museum, it’s a cultural history museum that uses motorcycles to tell the story of the American industrial revolution. I took some video clips that I’ll get to Sam soon for posting to the blog or IW website. I was especially interested in the “Homemade in America” exhibit that included an ice saw, a grass cutter, and a mining cart among other contraptions, all using a motorcycle as their basis and power source. What ingenuity!
As for moving, I understand there’s been no final decision made about that yet. We may all need to get on the bandwagon to encourage State and Federal officials to support and encourage facilities like the WTTM as depositories of this nation’s history. Western North Carolina certainly benefits from motorcyclists riding the lovely roads there by reaping tourist spending. In these times especially, anything that brings money into a community ought to be encouraged.