Lots of Mustang people down South know of Bob Powell, as he’d served as president of the MCA’s Tampa affiliate club for years before his work brought him back home from Florida. After experiencing the Mustang 45th Anniversary MCA celebration event at Barber Motorsports Park, Powell and his wife and sons felt it was time to take the idea of opening a Mustang museum in Alabama seriously. Like the Mustang Owners Museum which can expect a fan draw from nearby Charlotte Motor Speedway, building a museum in the Birmingham area near Barber Motorsports Park and the Talladega Superspeedway made a lot of sense for Powell.

“I looked around for property in that area and even talked to the people at Barber, and they were very supportive," Powell told us, despite the fact that Barber has its own Vintage Motorsports Museum (with 1,600-plus motorcycles on display there) and there’s also the International Motorsports Hall of Fame museum next to the legendary speedway in nearby Talladega County. Talks went from having Powell’s sons bring some of their cars to events at Barber as a promotion, to the possibility of collectively cross-promoting their separate attractions. It turns out that the response in support of Powell’s efforts to build a Mustang museum was far better than he had expected. Instead of seeing each other as competitors, all parties took a big-picture approach -- even to the point of considering the creation of a regional museum pass that would cover several of the museum and track attractions for the price of one ticket.

But Powell soon discovered that the cost of land, permits and construction in the greater Birmingham area would be prohibitively expensive for such a branded start-up, so he began looking at possible locations in his own St. Clair County. As he had explained to a local reporter, “I moved here when I was six, grew up here, went to school here. St. Clair has been good to us. We feel loyalty to this area, so our family thought it would be natural to open a museum here.”

With the support of local civic leaders and business owners alike, Powell unveiled his plans for building the Mustang Museum of America in Odenville during a special community meeting that was held in mid-2016 after property had already been secured and plans for the building itself were drawn up. Between Powell, his wife, Carolyn, and sons Jonathan and Gary, the family already had more than 70 Mustangs in their personal collections that could seed the museum. Most of the 110 cars now on display are privately owned with placeholders set aside for some Mustangs that are presently being restored. The Powells prefer to show cars as close to original condition as possible, although some notable examples do receive a partial or full restoration to bring them up to display standards.