HomeMediaGilmore plans to add muscle car museum to its campus

Gilmore plans to add muscle car museum to its campus

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The Gilmore Car Museum plans to “add a gear” to its buildings on its campus and has released architectural drawings and launched a funding campaign for a muscle car museum. 

The building will look like a 1970s car dealership and will provide 25,000 square feet of exhibition space, room to display as many as 40 classic muscle machines inside, with others parked outdoors under the structure’s canopied entrance.

Exterior views of the muscle car museum to be built in Hickory Corners, Michigan

“A museum built on muscle,” it says on the cover of the brochure. “Because no kid ever hung a poster of a compact car on their wall.”

“For more than 50 years, the Gilmore Car Museum has shared with visitors the history of America through the story of the automobile,” the museum notes in a brochure announcing the plan. 

“Our 90-acre campus is home to over 400 vehicles, beautiful displayed throughout historic buildings and re-created vintage settings. Auto enthusiasts, history buffs, students, and families alike have all been enthralled by the stories told through the exhibits.

Fund-raising brochure cover

“But there is an important chapter missing,” the museum admits. “The reality is that the advent of the muscle car marks a time in our history that should be honored and passed on in a way that exemplifies the spirit of the culture — but we have yet to fully celebrate the grit, heat, and power of the 1960s and early ‘70s muscle car era.

“It’s time for the Gilmore Car Museum to write its next chapter — the story of the American muscle car.”

Plans for the muscle car museum plan are being launched on the tire tracks of the Gilmore’s current and popular “Born to Perform: The Era of the Muscle Car” exhibition in the museum’s Heritage Center building.

The new building will join the “dealers’ row” on the south end of the Gilmore campus and is to be built just east of the Model A Ford Museum, which is patterned after a 1928 Ford dealership design. 

The museum’s current muscle car display has been very popular, with Chrysler’s on one side…
… and AMC, General Motors and Ford vehicles along the opposite wall

But unlike some of the buildings on the campus, the muscle car building is being undertaken not by a car owners’ club such as the Model A Ford Foundation or the Cadillac & LaSalle Club but by the museum itself, and thus the fund-raising effort in behalf of the Genevieve and Donald S. Gilmore Foundation that operates the Gilmore Car Museum in Hickory Corners, Michigan.

It all goes well, plans call for the new muscle car facility to open in 2021.

For additional details, visit the museum website.

Larry Edsall
Larry Edsall
A former daily newspaper sports editor, Larry Edsall spent a dozen years as an editor at AutoWeek magazine before making the transition to writing for the web and becoming the author of more than 15 automotive books. In addition to being founding editor at ClassicCars.com, Larry has written for The New York Times and The Detroit News and was an adjunct honors professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

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