Crawford Museum of Auto-Aviation

 Crawford Museum of Auto-Aviation

 Crawford Museum of Auto-Aviation is a transportation museum ( United States ). It is part of the Western Reserve Historical Society's Cleveland History Center in University Circle, and it has over 170 automobiles in its collection.

History

TRW's Frederick C. Crawford founded the museum, which opened in 1965. Crawford developed Thompson Products Auto Album, which grew into the collection. Crawford claimed that he began collecting automobiles because it seemed a disgrace to him to let them be scrapped, which was the destiny of practically all obsolete machines at the time. Crawford realized the need of preserving a few historically noteworthy specimens. 

In 1990, the museum sold over 70 autos at auction through Sotheby's.

In order to pay off its debts, the museum sold or auctioned 44 automobiles in 2009, 24 of which were sold at RM Auctions in October. The museum also sold a Goodyear F2G Corsair that it had bought from Walter Solatia and an Aircon DH.4 that Crawford had purchased. 

Setting the World in Motion, showing vehicles and planes built in northeast Ohio, and Revaluation: The Automobile in America, describing the history of the automobile in the United States, were the museum's primary exhibitions in 2018.

collections

In 2019, there were more than 170 autos, 12 planes, and three historic carriages, as well as motorbikes, boats, and bicycles. Over 190 m2 of file collections are housed at the facility. 

A P-51 Mustang racing plane used in the Thompson Trophy Races is part of the aviation collection.  The oldest automobile in the collection is a Panhead et Levassor from 1897, while more recent additions include a 1981 DMC DeLorean and a self-driving car named the DEXTER, which was Team Case's entry in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, where it finished in the top 20. 

The Tinkerbelle, a tiny sailboat in which Robert Manry sailed alone across the Atlantic Ocean in 1965, is also included in the collection. Manry gave it to the

visit us

The WRHS Library, located in University Circle, houses published resources (250,000 books, 25,000 newspapers, and numerous maps, sheet music, broadsides, and other printed ephemera) as well as unpublished manuscript collections (over 10,000 linear feet of processed personal papers and records, more than 340,000 images, and numerous audio and video recordings).

Since its inception, the Library's principal goal has been the documenting of the numerous parts of Cleveland and Northeastern Ohio history. Religion, politics, immigration, gender, ethnicity, transportation, business, labor, war, philanthropy, medicine, leisure, and numerous other aspects of life in the region are all shown.

The Library has also evolved into a major genealogy center, housing enormous collections of one-of-a-kind family history research resources.