Tupelo Automobile Museum

Tupelo may be best-known for being the birthplace of Elvis Presley, but the Mississippi town has another attraction. It’s been voted the best attraction in Tupelo by TripAdvisor reviewers, and in the Specialty Museums category for the whole of Mississippi it rates higher than both the Elvis Presley Birthplace Museum and the BB King Museum, which are both outstanding.

This star attraction is the Tupelo Automobile Museum, the largest private collection of cars east of the Mississippi.

‘It’s worth about $13 million,’ the woman at the ticket desk says when I ask the obvious question. ‘And we give a money-back guarantee when you buy your ticket but no-one has ever asked for a refund.’

The minute you walk through the door you can see why. The vast hangar-like building, which is 120,000 square feet in size, holds over 100 cars dating back to 1886, and every one of them is kept in perfect working order. There are another 50 cars in the collection that aren’t on display.

This is my second visit and even though I’m not hugely interested in cars, I’m still blown away by the beauty and the history contained in this building. On my first visit I was lucky enough to be shown around by Jane Spain, the widow of Frank Spain, the man who put together this remarkable collection.

‘Frank was an electronics engineer,’ Jane told me. ‘He worked on the project to develop colour TV in the USA. He was born in Ohio but his family moved to Tupelo during the depression when Frank was about eight.’

I asked Jane how the collection started.

‘Frank bought 12 cars from a 1400-car Reno collection that was being split up,’ she said, ‘and that was the start of it. He added to it, picking cars that he loved and he thought were important. It took him 40 years to gather these cars.’

We stop by the oldest car in the collection, a Benz from 1886, a 3-wheel vehicle that looks like a cross between a horse-drawn carriage and a bicycle, but with a primitive engine.

‘This 1886 Benz is the only replica in the collection.’ Jane said. ‘And they all work! We get lots of people come in who drive the Natchez Trace Parkway. They’re interested in motoring and cars. The prices shown on the labels are what they sold for at the time. They’re worth a little bit more than that today.’

The Natchez Trace Parkway runs from near Nashville to Natchez, passing just over three miles from the museum. Jane took me over to see another car, which was going to involve them in a drive a little longer than three miles.

‘The 1954 Mercury we bought in Fairbanks, Alaska, and when we said we were going to drive it back to Mississippi they looked at us like we were stealing their child and selling it into slavery. You’ll see a few marks on it. Well, we didn’t know parts of the Alaska Highway were a gravel road. It broke down in the Yukon.’

The newest car in the collection is a 1994 Dodge Viper, which has a top speed of 188mph (303 kph). What’s unusual about this model, though, is that it has never been driven, The mileometer shows just the 12 miles (19.3 kms) that were on it when it was delivered to the showroom from the factory.

This being Tupelo, there has to be an Elvis connection. Presley absolutely loved cars, and was even known to give them as gifts to people. One day he was looking through a car showroom window in Memphis chatting to a couple that were standing next to him. Do you like the car, he asked. Oh, the man said, we love it but could never afford it. So Elvis took them inside and bought it for them.

Whenever Elvis played in Denver, Colorado, a Captain Jerry Kennedy of the Denver Police took charge of his security. In 1976 Elvis bought Kennedy a brand new Lincoln Mark IV as a gift. That car, and the cheque for $13,386.69 that paid for it, are both on display in the Tupelo Automobile Museum. That’s about $60,000, allowing for inflation. Some gift. And some collection.