Ohio classic car museum Snook’s Dream Cars will close at the end of September after 24 years, and its entire collection is going up for sale. The move is in large part because Terry Steller, the mechanic in charge of keeping the cars running, is retiring.
It’s reported that museum owner Jeff Snook tried to find a successor to Steller, but the search proved fruitless; he couldn’t locate anyone with the heritage skills needed to keep the cars on the road.
Snook announced the closure in a Facebook post earlier this month. “It’s time to move on,” he then told the Sentinel-Tribune. Every car in the collection except for a 1965 Porsche 356 will be sold via Hagerty Marketplace with no reserve, and bidding closes on September 28. Snook opted to keep the 356 as his personal car.
The origins of the museum’s collection go back to 1963, when Snook and his father Bill restored a 1929 Ford Model A – Snook’s first car. The pair spent the following decades collecting classic cars and automobilia, and in May 2002 they opened the collection to the public as a museum in Bowling Green. Bill Snook died in 2013.
Snook’s Dream Cars visitors enter through a recreation of a 1940s Texaco petrol station, with the cars displayed in period scenes alongside shelves of model cars, oil cans, signs and pinball machines. Unlike with many museums, the entire collection was kept in ready-to-drive condition.
Snook estimates that between 40,000 and 50,000 people have visited, while the cars have also appeared at numerous motoring events.
The headline lot is a matching-numbers 1954 Kaiser-Darrin 161 (above). The 86th of 435 examples, it’s offered for sale having covered only 5200 miles. Bidding had reached $40,500 at the time of writing.
Other highlights include a 1963 Jaguar E-type Series 1 Roadster, a 1959 Alfa Romeo Giulietta Spider, a 1965 Ford Mustang Convertible and a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air Convertible that was discovered in an Ohio barn in 2007.
The museum’s automobilia will be sold by Whalen Auctions in spring 2027. Once everything is sold, Snook plans to sell the museum building and warehouse.
View the Snook’s Dream Cars collection here.
