Pioneer Auto Show

In 1945 A. J. Geisler, known as Dick, moved his family from Minnesota to Murdo, a cattle town on US-16 halfway between Sioux Falls and the Black Hills, and opened a John Deere and Chevrolet dealership, then a Phillips 66 station. He began picking up old cars and found that travelers on the highway would pull over to look at them. By 1954 he and his sons, John and Dave, had so many that they put up a building to show them, and the Pioneer Auto Museum opened beside the road. Dick died in 1973, and his sons kept buying and building.

The collection now fills more than forty buildings set around a motel, a gas station and a diner a block off I-90: some 250 vintage cars, from brass-era runabouts to muscle cars, around sixty tractors, more than fifty trucks, dozens of motorcycles and a horse-drawn hearse, most of them close enough to touch. The celebrity pieces include one of the cars that carried the cowboy star Tom Mix and an original General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard.

Then there is everything else: toy cars by the hundred, gas pumps, typewriters, Edison phonographs, a dentist's office, and the National Rockhound and Lapidary Hall of Fame. The family describes the place, fairly, as a village with some cars in it. It rewards a slow walk more than a quick one.