Unusual museums in Des Moines
Unusual museums in Des Moines: 6 genuinely strange collections, Boone County Historical Society (former Masonic Temple), National Sprint Car Hall of Fame & Museum and Henry Moore's Mini-Americana Barn Museum among them. These are the weird, quirky, offbeat museums locals forget to mention — not the big-name institutions already on every visitor guide. They spread across Boone, Knoxville, South Amana, Gladbrook (70 miles NE of Des Moines) and 2 more areas, so two or three can make a whole afternoon. Every entry is hand-vetted against real sources — not scraped off a top-ten list or averaged out of crowd ratings.
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Boone County Historical Society (former Masonic Temple)
The 1907 Champlin Memorial Masonic Temple — now the Boone History Center — is a legitimately operating county museum whose resident poltergeist "Frank" is blamed for slamming doors, triggering the old elevator, and switching lights back on after closing. Staff working late have reported hearing their names called in an empty building, giving the place a genuinely eerie layer beneath its exhibits on Eisenhower, Kate Shelley, and early Boone history.
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National Sprint Car Hall of Fame & Museum
This non-profit museum sits right beside the legendary Knoxville Raceway and puts 30-35 winged open-wheel sprint cars on the floor — machines that look like they were built to go fast and break apart simultaneously. The whole place hums with the mythology of dirt-track racing, from storied champions to the mechanics who kept the beasts alive.
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Henry Moore's Mini-Americana Barn Museum
Housed in an 1876 horse barn in South Amana, the Henry Moore Barn Museum holds over 200 hand-crafted miniature replicas of American buildings — a Southern plantation, Lincoln's New Salem village, a California logging camp — all built at 1-inch-to-the-foot scale by retired farmer Henry Moore over 15 years. The detail is staggering: the Amana barn replica alone has 9,897 individually hand-hammered tiny nails.
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Matchstick Marvels Museum
Somewhere in a town of ~1,000 people on the Iowa prairie, a retired art teacher named Patrick Acton has been gluing wooden matchsticks together since the 1980s — and the result is one of the genuinely strangest small museums in America. His 80 completed models (nearly 10 million matchsticks total) include a 13-foot USS Iowa, a six-foot Minas Tirith, the Millennium Falcon, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Space Shuttle Challenger, and — unveiled April 2026 — a nine-foot Cinderella Castle made from 607,000 matchsticks and 2,800 hours of labor. Atlas Obscura, Roadside America, and Wikipedia all flag it; most Des Moines residents have never been. It's the kind of place you stumble on and immediately need to tell everyone about.
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National Hobo Museum
A one-of-a-kind single-subject museum devoted to hobo culture and the open road, housed in a former 1920s movie theater and stuffed with artifacts, paintings, and the secret chalk-and-charcoal sign language hobos used to mark safe houses.
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Fjord Færgemand (Dambo Troll)
A 25-foot wooden troll standing in a boat with an oar carved from a downed tree, built from reclaimed materials by Danish artist Thomas Dambo and unveiled in April 2026. It's hidden in the prairie landscape behind the Museum of Danish America.
Unusual museums in Des Moines — FAQ
Which unusual museums & collections in Des Moines are the strangest?
Ranked by how strange they actually are: Boone County Historical Society (former Masonic Temple), National Sprint Car Hall of Fame & Museum and Henry Moore's Mini-Americana Barn Museum. Boone County Historical Society (former Masonic Temple) — The 1907 Champlin Memorial Masonic Temple — now the Boone History Center — is a legitimately operating county museum whose resident poltergeist "Frank" is blamed for slamming doors, triggering the old elevator, and switching lights back on after closing.
Where in Des Moines are they?
Across Boone, Knoxville, South Amana, Gladbrook (70 miles NE of Des Moines) and Britt and 1 more. Each listing gives the neighborhood and address so you can cluster a couple into one outing.
Is this a good weird date in Des Moines?
That's what the list is built for. Every entry has a specific move rather than a vague recommendation — at Boone County Historical Society (former Masonic Temple), for instance: Visit during open hours (Tue–Sat, 10am–1pm) to tour the museum's history galleries in the atmospheric old Masonic lodge, then linger near closing time when the building is emptying out and "Frank" is most active — listen for footsteps on the second floor or the elevator moving on its own, and end with dinner in downtown Boone a block away.
How were these unusual museums & collections chosen?
An agentic research system digs for the genuinely obscure — the spots even locals miss — and every one is verified against real sources before it makes the list. We deliberately skip the landmarks already on every Des Moines guide.