But the Mustang’s 50th anniversary celebrations during 2014 rekindled the motoring public’s desire for a museum dedicated to the Ford Mustang. It was then when Ford enthusiasts took it upon themselves to get something built. Sure enough, by April of 2019, Ford and Mustang fans flocked to suburban Charlotte, North Carolina, for a “55 Years of Mustang” event at the newly opened Mustang Owners Museum in Concord, NC, just down the road from the Charlotte Motor Speedway. But hearts sank less than a year later when the museum had moved out of its newly constructed home to a smaller building across the street.

Anyone who cares about the Ford Mustang should care about having a Mustang museum, and the efforts of the Mustang Owners Museum’s master, Steve Hall, to keep the idea alive despite a series of financial challenges is both commendable and worthy of fan support. Ford Performance toured the newly relocated museum (MOM) and visited with Hall for an upcoming story on FordPerformance.com. But our interest for some time now has been focused on visiting “that other Mustang museum” down in Alabama only about a six-hour drive from Charlotte -- the Mustang Museum of America.

Haven’t yet heard of the Mustang Museum of America (MMoA)? Exactly – that’s why we needed to go there. The MMoA didn’t open with all the fanfare and publicity afforded to the Mustang Owners Museum, and doesn’t have the social media presence, event-based interaction with Mustang clubs and weekly email newsletter that Hall provides for MOM. But what it does offer is uniqueness, a down-home family Mustang atmosphere, the world’s largest collection of SSP Mustangs and lots of room for growth. After being tipped off by some of you that it was a gem of a place to experience, we made the call to set up a visit to the big Mustang museum in the little Alabama town. While Odenville, Alabama -- situated about 20 miles northeast of Birmingham -- is home to less than 4,000 residents, it’s also now home to the freshly constructed, 30,000-square-foot Mustang Museum of America that boasts an expansive lot whose grassy area could easily host a car show with a few hundred participants.

The big, blue-steel, climate-controlled building now gaining proper fame as the Mustang Museum of America had opened its doors to the public on March 17, 2019, and has been drawing an increasing number of fans and visitors since. The museum is the realization of a dream for longtime Mustang collector and enthusiast Robert Powell, who admitted he’d been thinking about building a museum for 15 years before finally deciding to make it a reality about five years ago. Powell grew up in Alabama and says that when he first spotted a new Mustang at a local filling station as a teenager, he thought it was “the most beautiful car on the road.”