The Miracle of America
Bittersweet Nostalgia Meets Post-Apocalyptic Dread in Polson, Montana
Yards and yards of battered old junk
The Miracle of America Museum in Polson, Montana is a maze of hallways, niches, nooks, barns, garages, sheds, and open yards packed with an array of objects, from lunch boxes to fighter jets. Hallucinatory in its variety but simple in its mission, it is less a museum than a sermon in junk, the result of decades of collecting by a local fellow named Gil Mangels who prayed to God in 1983 about what to do with his mountains of old stuff. One night at 3 AM his answer came, spoken by a disembodied voice: “Use your antiques to teach.” He established the museum two years later and since then, such is Mangels’ zeal and stamina, it has been open every day, seven days a week. MOAM contains, by some accounts (which seem accurate once you step inside it), 38,000 items. Just ten paces into the main hall on a recent visit, I was already overwhelmed, having beheld a horse collar, several scales and balances, numerous rodent traps, a bugle, multiple machine guns, a stuffed ram, a hooded black …