The Midwest and West have an abundance of pioneer museums, but Harold Warp’s place stands out because of the breadth of his devotion as a collector. Warps, the son fog immigrant pioneers, spend his life acquiring things that showed, in his words, “man’s progress since 1830.”

This meant virtually everything: tools, cars, motorcycles, locomotive, dishware, entire buildings ( firehouse, a Pony Express station, a sod hut), thousands of fishing lures, one entire building filled with home appliances, a collection of trivets, a collection of hat pins, a collection of musical instruments, twenty-two airplanes, on hundred tractors. The inventory continued to grow even after Warp opened the village in 1953, and some of the more modern displays include the development of the snowmobile, outboard motors, TV technology, and atomic power. At last counted twenty-six buildings spread over twenty acres containing more than fifty thousand things.