We have mentioned Harvest Hosts many times in our travel blogs. As a reminder, Harvest Hosts is a membership organization that provides access to businesses that allow one overnight stay in their parking lots, so long as you frequent the business. We typically use Harvest Hosts for heavy travel days, which are days when we need to cover a lot of miles and are looking for a place that we can arrive late, hopefully get food or drink (ideally both), and get an early start the next morning. Most Harvest Hosts provide no utilities (water, electric, sewer) and expect RVs to be fully self-contained. 

When returning from the Branson Rally, we needed a place to stay near Wheeling, West Virginia. We couldn’t find a brewery, winery, restaurant or distillery that was close to our route, so we stayed at the Kruger Street Toy and Train Museum, a Harvest Host member.

The Museum is housed in an old elementary school building, Kruger Street Elementary, built in 1906. The building was used continuously as a school until 1991 and is mostly unchanged. It still contains its yellow pine floors, tin ceiling and Belfry with the original 1-ton school bell.

In the 1970’s, Allan Robert Miller and his son, Allan Raymond, began actively collecting toy trains. Their collection of model trains expanded into 1950’s playsets (such as Easy Bake Ovens), dolls and dollhouses, puzzles, board games and toys from the second half of the 20th century. The collection grew to the point that the Miller’s realized they needed to open a museum to house and exhibit their collection. The museum currently has a half million items in its collection, of which about 30,000 are on display.

The toy train layouts were large and nothing short of amazing. Some provided viewing ports so one could see the action from the middle of the train layout.

As you can see below the puzzle collection is vast and large.

Matchbox, Hot Wheels, toy soldiers and even Rock’em, Sock’em Robots! The toys rekindled Sue and Joe’s memories of toys from the 1950’s 60′ and 70’s!

The toy displays included many “moving” dioramas featuring toys. Here are two featuring Halloween and Amusement Park themes.

Now it’s time for the peanuts. No that’s Peanuts™! The entire ground floor of the museum is dedicated to the Peanuts™ -themed collection of Dr. William Mercer of Wheeling WV. The collection, which was donated to the museum in 2022, is still being inventoried; however, there are hundreds of items on display.

There are Peanuts figures ranging in size from a few inches to human size.

There are also lots of clothing, commemorative coins and stamps featuring Peanuts characters.

There are dozens of lunch boxes, lamps, and original Peanuts™ art work.

The Peanuts™ collection alone, is worth the trip to the Kruger Street Toy and Train museum. If your travels take you close to Wheeling, WV, we recommend taking a brief detour to visit. And, if you are traveling in an RV, you can spend the night there. ;) We suggest allowing a minimum of two hours for your tour to let your inner child out.

Stay tuned as we play “catch-up’ with our posts.