McMinnville, Oregon: Spruce Goose and Space Museum

The Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum is best known as the home of the world's largest wooden flying boat, the Spruce Goose, SR-71 Blackbird, the Titan II SLV Missile and the Grumman F6F-3 "Hellcat." In addition, there are more than 150 historic aircraft, spacecraft and exhibits on display, along with artwork, traveling displays, the Spruce Goose Café, the Cosmo Café, the Rotors, Wings & Things store, the Right Stuff Store and Oregon's largest IMAX® 3D theater.

In the spring of 2009, we added to our facility with the opening of the Captain Michael King Smith Firearms Collection.

The Evergreen Aviation Museum, McMinnville, Oregon, home of Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose, has added props from the "The Aviator" to its collection. Four miniatures from Martin Scorcese's film, one with a wing span of 25 feet, will be unveiled on Memorial Day weekend....

The Evergreen Aviation Museum, McMinnville, OR, won a bid for a two and one-half ton Russian Photon space capsule that orbited the Earth in 1990. The museum grabbed the spacecraft for $30,000 at an auction in Tacoma, after the phone connection to a New York-based counter bidder "dropped." The seller, noted, somewhat unhappily, that similar capsules have sold for ten times that price.

Evergreen Aviation has built a special 121,000 sq ft museum to house and display the Spruce Goose (Hughes Aviation HK-1 Flying Boat, technically).

The building and plane are amazing enough, but the rest of the collection, literally under the massive wings of the HK-1, is terrific too: P-51D Mustang, P-40 Warhawk, P-38 Lightning, Korean era MIG 15, 1903 Wright Flyer, B-17G Flying Fortress, FG-1D Corsair, Messerschmitt BF109, Submarine Spitfire.

Many of the volunteer docents are vets who flew the various warbirds. Only about 30 miles from Portland. We were there for HOURS!

McMinnville, OR, once known simply as The Walnut City, has opened the Captain Michael King Smith Aviation Educational Institute, featuring the fabled "Spruce Goose" flying boat once belonging to billionaire Howard Hughes.