American Dime Museum

The American Dime Museum (ADM) was co-founded in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, by artist and antique dealer Richard Horne and James Taylor (author), writer and publisher of the sideshow journal Shocked and Amazed! Opening November 1, 1999, the museum recreated, in spirit, the dime museums which saw their heyday in the 19th and early 20th centuries in America. The museum closed officially in late 2006.

The museum started out as two rooms of its 1808 Maryland Avenue address, which had previously been Horne’s antique shop and art studio, Time Bandit, which became Horne's moniker and nickname. Early on, the museum expanded to include the entire first floor of 1808 (the galleries in homage to dime museum attractions), a lower gallery (which housed the sideshow attractions), and the first floor of 1806 Maryland Ave. (devoted to old-time stage performance and natural history attractions). At one point, for a brief period, the museum also included a wax gallery located in the front room of 1804. Its wax show was the Lord’s Last Supper, a staple of wax museums and traveling shows for decades, the display based in the famous Da Vinci artwork.

During its years of operation, the ADM or “the Dime,” as it was known to many, showcased an array of permanent attractions, many authentic and many “authentic fakes” or gaffs as they would be termed by show people. Such manufactured attractions were the forte of Horne, whose artworks in that vein included the Samoan Sea Wurm (a “mummified” sea serpent carcass showcased with a bite of fur from the shipboard cat it had supposedly eaten) and Lincoln’s Last Turd (a gaff of a gaff, actually, since it was displayed as a fake made not by Horne but by another who had tried to cash in on the craze for Lincoln memorabilia by faking the assassinated president’s last bowel movement). Between Horne’s gaff artworks, the tongue-in-cheek signs throughout the museum, the wild assortment of off-beat attractions, and the uproarious periodic live shows given off-site (since the museum had no space for performance), the museum garnered a vast amount of publicity including write ups in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Japan Times, The Baltimore Sun and travel magazines, including National Geographic Traveler. It was also featured frequently on both television and radio, from two segments on National Public Radio to an episode of National Geographic Channel’s Mummy Roadshow, the episode focusing on the museum’s giant mummy. The museum was also the site of filming for numerous television documentaries on the subject of sideshows and “weirdness as entertainment,” usually featuring Taylor in his capacity as variety entertainment historian.

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