Pensacola, Florida -
T. T. Wentworth Jr. Museum

The T. T. Wentworth Museum in downtown Pensacola is the current incarnation of a roadside museum opened in 1957 in Ensley, FL, just north of Pensacola. In the '80s, Wentworth said he would donate his collection of damn near everything if the city of Pensacola would continue to display it. The city agreed, renovated the old downtown city hall, and opened the T. T. Wentworth Jr. Florida State Museum.

There are three floors of exhibits, but, unfortunately, only one floor is devoted to Wentworth's oddball collection. My brother, a Pensacola native, says that as the years have passed, the museum seems to have become more and more mainstream and less devoted to the odd, bizarre, and often useless things that Wentworth collected. It's still worth seeing, mind you, just not as much fun as it used to be.

And they don't sell "I saw the Petrified Cat" t-shirts anymore. [Dean Jeffrey, 02/15/2003]

The T.T. Wentworth Museum in downtown Pensacola houses four floors of oddities. There is a Coca-cola room (which I always thought was odd since Pensacola sounds more like Pepsi-cola) that displays Coke bottles and soda vending machines. There is a petrified cat (the cat somehow became stuck in a chimney of a local resident's house many many years ago and thus became petrified). An actual shrunken head is next to the cat. The museum also has the World's Largest Man's shoe. A very eclectic collection. The top floor also has a Children's Discovery Museum, where kids can play grocery store or news reporter. T.T. Wentworth was a man who was very rich and very eccentric and collected just about anything. When he died, the City Council decided to honor him by converting his home into a museum, and over the years there have been donations to the museum's collection from throughout the world. [Shannon Ely, 01/01/2000]