America’s Road Trip: Route 66’s Most Fascinating Museums

It is a relatively unknown fact that barbed wire contributed greatly to the settling of the American West. Originally invented in 1868 as a means of preventing cattle from eating crops, barbed wire was given its modern form by Joseph Glidden’s improvements in 1874. Prior to this, farmers often used Osage Orange, a small thorny tree found in Texas, as a naturally growing barrier.  

Nicknamed “Devil’s Rope” by Native Americans, the wire proved highly effective on cattle, but also destructive against an entire ecosystem. One notable example: By impeding the American buffalo’s access to grazing land and water, it became a major factor in the near-extinction of the once-prominent creature.

This small museum in the Texas panhandle details the history of barbed wire. Located in a former bra factory, the museum has thousands of different types of barbed wire on display, plus demos on how to make your own “devil’s rope.” For art lovers, sculptures made entirely of barbed wire are featured both inside and outside the museum. 

The largest private gun collection in the world is located in Claremore, Oklahoma, across the street from the Will Rogers Memorial Museum. A prominent local hotel owner, J.M. Davis leased his entire collection to the state of Oklahoma in 1965 for $1 a year. The museum opened in 1969 and Mr. Davis is still there, entombed in a crypt in 1973 on museum grounds so that he could stay with his guns forever. 

While the guns are the highlight (notables include the world’s smallest manufactured automatic pistol and a Chinese cannon gun from the 14th century), the museum features other items as well. These include German beer steins, World War I posters and a rather creepy set of “used nooses.”   

Wax figures of notorious outlaw Jesse James, famously shot by his supposed ally Robert Ford in 1882, would have been enough to make this museum on Missouri’s stretch of Route 66 a worthwhile stop. But the museum also presents an outlandish but fascinating theory: What if Jesse James didn’t die that day? What if his shooting was just an elaborate ruse? What if James lived to 1951 and died at age 104?

In 1948, a Texas man named J. Frank Dalton claimed that he was, in fact, Jesse James. After years of hiding the secret, Dalton said, he had finally decided to reveal his "true" identity to the world before his death. There were skeptics aplenty, but businessman Rudy Turilli believed and made it his life’s work to prove that J. Frank Dalton was Jesse James.

Today, the Turilli family still owns and runs the museum, along with the nearby Meramec Caverns where the James/Dalton gang supposedly hid out. 

Driving Route 66 can feel like being transported via time machine into 1950s America—the days of pink Cadillacs, soda jerks and the threat of nuclear annihilation.  

Located less than a mile off the historic road, the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History charts United States advancements in nuclear science. Besides exhibits on the Manhattan Project and Atomic Pinup Girls, the museum is home to some of the most remarkable artifacts of the atomic age. The B-29 Superfortress, the first type of plane to drop a nuclear bomb, is regarded as the “aircraft that won World War II.” There are only 17 still in existence, including the one stationed behind the museum, although the museum's plane never actually saw combat. The collection also includes two hydrogen bomb casings from the infamous Palomares incident, when American H-bombs were accidentally dropped (but not detonated) on Spain in 1966.

Despite its rather ordinary name, this facility on the outskirts of Oklahoma City is anything but. Jay Villemarette’s fascination with bones began as a kid, when he found a dog skull in his backyard. His collection grew, and soon he started a small skull-and-skeleton-sales business out of his house.

One thing that always proved difficult for Villamarette was getting the bones clean. He tried boiling, burning and bleaching, but all of these methods were potentially dangerous, expensive and didn’t work all that well. One day while out collecting, he noticed a specimen being eaten away by dermestid beetles, or skin beetles. Indiginous to North America, the beetles aid the natural decomposition process in the wild. Villamarette had found his solution to his bone-cleaning problem.

Today, Villamarette and his retail company, Skulls Unlimited, employ tanks of dermestid beetles to help clean the excess meat off specimens. One of these tanks, plus nearly 1,000 bone and skeleton specimens, are on display at the Museum of Osteology—“America’s only skeleton museum”—located next door to the processing plant of Skulls Unlimited.