Looking back on 17 years of the Harley-Davidson Museum

The Harley-Davidson Museum^™ is a must-see for anyone planning a trip to the home of the Motor Company. Now 17 years old, we look back on how far it’s come

Words: David Kreidler, Exhibits Curator, Harley-Davidson Museum

When it comes to Harley-Davidson’s historic collection, its history (ironically) is a bit of a mystery. Around 1919, the company’s founders asked for one new bike a year to be saved and put into storage, starting a tradition which carries on to the present.

But the collection is more than motorcycles – it includes thousands of small artefacts and paper records, too. Who saved these and why? There’s only guess work and logic to guide. It’s unknown whether one person made a conscious decision to save the material, if it started by many people in various departments, or if it happened because the Motor Company literally never left its original brick factory on Juneau Avenue in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

What is known is this: together, it is an astoundingly complete collection, giving insights into Harley-Davidson from its earliest days to the present.  

Whatever its origins, the bike collection has had a transient existence, at one point split between Milwaukee and the York Factory in Pennsylvania. Except being on display in York for several years, almost all of it – bikes, smaller artefacts, and documents – were hidden away behind lock and key. Few Harley employees ever viewed the breadth of the collection.

That began to change in the mid-1990s, when the archives were started and all the material began to be gathered and organised. They began working to make the information in the collection more accessible to employees, to help them in their day-to-day jobs. Engineers, marketing, legal, licencing and apparel, and other departments soon had greater access to the materials.

A few years later, in the run-up to its 100^th anniversary, the Motor Company began to seriously explore opening a museum. Opening a museum that breaks a paradigm is no easy feat. Most motorcycle collections – no matter how fantastic – cater to enthusiasts who don’t need help understanding how awesome, say, an all original 1936 Harley-Davidson^® EL – also known as the “Knucklehead” – with 100 miles on the odometer is. They don’t need it to be put in context, because they already know the story.

Harley-Davidson didn’t want to make a museum just for them, however. The Motor Company wanted a place for people with a wide variety of interests to visit, enjoy, and connect with H-D history. Therefore, when the original curatorial team worked on the first exhibits, they focused on the people of Harley-Davidson. Bikes, like the historic 1903 ‘Serial Number One’, were put into the context of their time.

Other times, the curators chose unusual stories from Harley history. For instance, did you know Harley-Davidson was once a leader in the golf cart industry? That the Motor Company once manufactured a boat and a snowmobile for a few short years? For guests who didn’t, the part of the exhibit that houses these curiosities offers a delightful and memorable surprise.

Other artefacts came about by chance. In 2011, a storage container holding a 2004 Harley-Davidson Night Train^® washed out to sea when the tsunami devastated Japan. It didn’t sink. Instead, the container was swept along by the Pacific Ocean currents until it was discovered washed up on a beach in British Columbia. The owner, who’d survived the disaster, gave the bike to the museum, where it continues to be on display – a memorial to the victims.

The museum’s team has also presented special exhibits with loaned artefacts that come into the staff’s care for a little while. These exhibits – which only open for a short run – present topics that are sometimes specific to a motorcycles, such as the 2015 retrospective exhibit on the career of Willie G. Davidson. Filled with items loaned from the personal collection of the legendary designer and company executive, it tracked his life from boyhood, growing up around the Motor Company (his dad, William A. Davidson, became president when Walter Davidson died in 1943) to his iconic designs and the influences that inspired him.

Other special exhibits explored topics that connected motorcycling to larger culture. In 2014, The American Road explored the origins of the road trip and the roadside Americana. It included an 11-foot-tall neon motel sign and a 1930s house car – an early ancestor of the now ubiquitous RV.

Daredevils, an exhibit in 2019, told guests about the origins of death-defying motorcycle performances. That exhibit included a very old and very large family heirloom: a 13-foot-tall iron Globe of Death. Loaned by the Erwin Urias and his family, it had been built by his great-grandfather in the 1910s in Brazil and travelled from South America to North America as the family moved north.

The Harley-Davidson Museum^™ exhibits are not static; although sometimes the change comes slowly, other times it happens in a flash. There have been photography exhibits that plumb the depths of the archives collection and others that show off kustom kulture. Still others discussing how a new model motorcycle is designed, engineered, and built. After all, this is the Harley-Davidson Museum. Since you keep rolling, we do, too. Ride on!   

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