The Gilmore Car Museum invites the Lincoln clubs to build a museum on its unique Michigan campus.

Gilmore Invites Lincoln Clubs

The internationally acclaimed Gilmore Car Museum of Hickory Corners, Michigan, was opened to the public in 1966, and is located about equal distance between the major population centers of Detroit, Chicago, and Indianapolis. The Gilmore currently displays over 250 extraordinary vintage vehicles in fifteen historic buildings including antique barns, an operating 1940’s diner, and a recreated 1930’s Shell gas station. The museum maintains a comprehensive schedule of events, activities and educational programs, receiving over 80,000 visitors each year. 

In recent years, the Gilmore Car Museum has offered partnerships to selected automotive groups to develop sites on the Gilmore campus to construct museum buildings open to the public. Uniquely, the buildings and their contents would be owned and managed by the partner organizations.

To date, the Classic Car Club of America, the Pierce-Arrow Foundation, the Cadillac-LaSalle Museum, the Tucker Automobile Club, the H. H. Franklin Car Club, the National Miniatures Trust and the Ford Model A Foundation have accepted invitations to construct buildings or maintain collections on the Gilmore Car Museum site.

The Gilmore graciously extended an invitation to the four Lincoln affinity clubs to construct a museum building on the Gilmore campus. The invitation meshed perfectly with the clubs’ strategic plans for the future; accordingly, they eagerly accepted the invitation and ground was broken for the Lincoln Motor Car Heritage Museum on June 1, 2013.

The Lincoln clubs will own and administer the Lincoln museum building and collections. The Gilmore will lease the land to the clubs and provide day-to-day maintenance of the building and the collection for a monthly fee. The Lincoln clubs have chosen to utilize their public educational foundation, the Lincoln Motor Car Heritage Foundation, as the repository for the funds required to build and furnish the museum. The Lincoln Motor Car Heritage Foundation is a not-for-profit foundation incorporated in Michigan and designated by the Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) foundation under the Internal Revenue Code. As such, contributions to the museum building fund, the archives or the education outreach program should be deductible for Federal income tax purposes.