LeMay the Largest Private Car Museum

LeMay – America’s Car Museum (ACM) spotlights America’s love affair with the automobile.  Featuring a nine-acre campus – with a four-story museum as the centerpiece – ACM, situated atop Tacoma, Wash., 30 minutes south of Seattle and in the shadow of Mt. Rainier, is one of the world’s largest auto museums and attractions when it opened in June 2012. ACM is designed to preserve history and celebrate the world’s automotive culture.  The spacious facility houses up to 350 cars, trucks and motorcycles from private owners, corporations, and the LeMay collection, which amassed a Guinness Book record of more than 3,500 vehicles in the mid-‘90s.The founders of the Car Museum have been Harold and Nancy LeMay.

They have amassed in excess of 2,000 vehicles and thousands of artifacts which were donated to the LeMay  Museum.  In 1998, Harold and Nancy LeMay formed the 501c3 charitable organization, The Harold E LeMay Museum   and committed themselves to donating the vast LeMay Collection to the Museum for the benefit of the public. The Museum  was chartered to secure, preserve and interpret the valuable LeMay Collection, along with additional vehicles and artifacts that it may acquire, in order to explore the broad themes of American mobility and lifestyle in an instructive and entertaining manner.  The magnitude of the   collection, and its power to relate the story of the American experience with the automobile, demands a new paradigm in transportation museums.  The new museum will be an inviting place, eliciting memories and stories from those who visit. It will provide a venue to explore history, design, technology and restoration. In short, the museum will create “America's Auto Experience” and become a world-class tourist destination in its own right. 

The museum was conceived just before Harold’s death. A dedicated volunteer team maintains the collection. They come in once a week. They talk about old cars, toss around old Harold stories, and Nancy buys them lunch. They then go in, one by one, starting the cars, judging what condition they are in and what is needed. Because of zoning restrictions, Nancy cannot maintain a public museum. However she opens it to the masses with hundreds of volunteers and thousands visiting every year.   After the official launch of the museum  , this $100 million project would be touted as the  largest auto museum and famous attraction in the world This would l bring an estimated 500,000 visitors and some $34,000,000 to the local economy annually. 

The  Largest Privately owned museum had amassed over 2000 vehicles  and thousands of artifacts was set by the LeMay Museum  at Tacoma, Washington, United States of America on June 2,2012.