New Mustang museums appeal to enthusiasts

What America needs is a museum that pays homage to the great American automobile introduced in 1964 – the Ford Mustang. Why not two, to double the pleasure?

Voilà. A pair of Mustang museums opened in 2019. Both are located in the South.

Travel first to Odenville, Ala., to tour the new Mustang Museum of America. Odenville is a small town in St. Clair County, northeast of Birmingham.

Odenville, with a population of 4,000, is an interesting “site selection” choice made by Bob Powell, who graduated from St. Clair County High School in 1967.

After retirement, he “came back home” from Tampa, Fla., with 70 Mustangs in tow, vehicles that he had collected over the years, determined to invest in the Mustang heritage.

Powell’s Mustang museum is located on 5.3 acres of land behind Fred’s Super Dollar in Odenville.

Almost 100 Mustangs from all model years are housed within the 31,000-square-foot structure. Additionally, the museum has the largest collection of Mustang highway patrol and police vehicles in the world.

If you’re going…Barber Motorsports Park and Barber Vintage Motorsport Museum, a popular tourist attraction in Leeds, Ala., is only 13 miles from Odenville. The museum houses the world’s largest collection of motorcycles.

Travel 392 miles east from Odenville to Concord, N.C., to visit the Mustang Owner’s Museum. The two-story, 42,000-square-foot facility is described by freelance automotive writer Jeff Burgy as a “national shrine of sorts for Ford’s famed pony car.”

The Concord project was spearheaded by Mustang hobbyists Steve Hall of Atlanta, and Ron Bramlett of Morada, Calif. Hall is now the museum’s executive director. He previously served as the chief marketing officer for the Mustang Club of America. Bramlett operates Mustangs Plus, a shop that specializes in “restomod” – restored vintage Mustangs with modifications.

They strategically located the museum within 2 miles of the Charlotte Motor Speedway motorsports complex in Concord, and less than 20 miles from the NASCAR Hall of Fame in downtown Charlotte.

The Mustang Owner’s Museum property is adjacent to the Dennis Carpenter Ford Restoration Parts complex. It has been a popular destination for collectors to shop for Ford restoration parts for more than 46 years. The company uses original Ford factory tooling to manufacture quality parts. The Carpenter family was also a key contributor to the museum.

Among the dignitaries present for the ribbon cutting ceremony on April 17, 2019, was retired Ford stylist Gale Halderman, the designer behind the original Mustang. The event commemorated the 55-year anniversary of the Mustang product launch in 1964.

An essay posted on the website of CJ Pony Parts, based in Harrisburg, Pa., reported that the Mustang name was suggested by Ford’s executive stylist John Najjar, who was fascinated with a World War II fighter plane known as the P-51 Mustang.

Widely considered the best American fighter plane of the World War II era, the power and reliability of the P-51 Mustangs allowed bombardiers to carry out long-range missions from England to Germany.

Ford executives weren’t too keen about naming their car after an aircraft, so Najjar “switched horses in the middle of the stream,” so to speak, aligning the Mustang car with the mustang horse, untamed and roaming free throughout the American West…promising its owner with the “excitement of wide-open spaces.”

At first, Ford’s running horse Mustang logo design resembled the athletic emblem of the Mustangs of Southern Methodist University (SMU), located in Dallas, Texas.

The SMU horse logo faces the right, so Halderman flipped the Ford horse to depict a horse running to the left or toward the “wild, wild west.”

Halderman’s appearance in Concord generated interest for his own venture, the Gale Halderman Museum in the Mustang Barn, located on the family strawberry farm in Tipp City, Ohio, about 16 miles north of Dayton. 

Gale’s grandfather, John Halderman would be proud of his grandson’s contributions to Ford and the success with the “pony car,” although he didn’t have much use for horses on his farm.

Old John used to say, dagnabbit it all: “A dumb mule is smarter than a smart horse.” He said a mule knows to stop at the end of the row and turn around to start on the next section without being told or motioned to do it.