Roadside America Museum

Carroll Estes has spent his life fixated on the past. Professionally, he made his living through his restoration shop Carroll’s Classic Auto Body. Personally, he was snapping up pieces of 1950s memorabilia, relics, and iconography before they were even retro, amassing an impressive enough collection by 1975 to begin showing it off to the public. 

That collection has since grown so massive that it demanded a space of its own — a former Ford dealership in Hillsboro, Texas. The Roadside America Museum is a one-stop shop to sink into warm nostalgia for the golden age of the American road trip, and includes treasures like the oversize Big Boy figures from a pair of now-shuttered Texas restaurants. 

Though Carroll has said that he most likes the world of 1959, his collection has expanded across time as well as space. The main museum is attached to a general store that commemorates earlier decades, especially the 1940s. 

The Roadside America Museum takes an unabashedly tendentious view of the 1950s. It is interested almost exclusively in recapturing the idealized recollection of its curator, and does not try to present itself as a historical snapshot so much as a celebration of what Carroll misses most about his childhood.