The Drive-Thru Museum of Wonder: Alabama’s Most Curious Museum

Outsider artist Butch Anthony has had a lifelong attraction to strange and curious objects. At the tender age of 14, Butch constructed a one-room cabin in his hometown of Seale, Alabama to store found objects such as arrowheads, fragments of bone, and mummified rats. Over time, Butch began to fashion his own unusual creations, which were very much inspired by the odds and ends he unearthed wandering around rural Seale. The weird and wonderful world of Butch Anthony eventually became so expansive that it grew well beyond the confines of a simple log cabin.

Butch eventually christened his workshop full of oddities the Museum of Wonder. As throngs of people began to descend on the Museum of Wonder, Butch started to get slightly irritated because he felt like he wasn’t getting any work done. When a neighbor offered to sell Butch an adjacent plot of land, the notion of a drive-thru museum began to take shape. Butch loved the idea of people seeing his work without him having to constantly engage with them. In 2014, Butch debuted the world’s first drive-thru art gallery.

The Drive-Thru Museum features shipping containers filled with perfectly preserved coiled snakes in pickle jars, old timey photographs with white bones painted on them, and a taxidermied bird of prey suspended in flight. Visitors can view a cornucopia of natural and man-made curiosities without leaving the comfort of their automobiles.

Best of all, the Drive-Thru Museum is free. Visitors are welcome to leave a donation if they are inspired by the beautifully curated rows of oddities that greet them. No road trip is complete without a little roadside strangeness. A trip to The Museum of Wonder will convince you that there is more to the state of Alabama than meets the eye. Visionary artists tend to emerge in the most unlikely places.

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