Wheels of Yesteryear is a car museum on Hospitality Lane, just off U.S. 501 in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Parking is out front and the gift shop is at the door. The cars inside belong to one family.
They opened the place in September 2009 and they still own it. For most of the first fourteen years, 40 or 50 cars were out at a time. The rest stayed in storage.
The collection kept outgrowing the building, so the museum closes for about two weeks each January and swaps the floor. It shut on January 20, 2026, and opened again on February 6.
Ninety-three cars are out now. There are more than 150 in the collection. That leaves about 60 of them somewhere a ticket doesn't reach, and the next lineup isn't announced in advance.
A 1940 Ford and a drag strip
Paul Cummings' father bought him a 1940 Ford Coupe, and that car is where everything on Hospitality Lane starts.
He grew up on a farm in North Carolina.
By his junior year of high school, he was already taking cars to the drag strip, including tracks at Sanford and Rockingham.
Mopars kept showing up in the other lane often enough that he eventually started bringing home Dodge and Plymouth cars of his own.
The buying picked up in the 1970s. Many of the cars he wanted hadn't become collectibles yet.
Some were only a few years old, and $800 could still buy one.
That made room for more than Mopar.
Chevrolet, Ford, Buick, AMC, Pontiac, Mercury, and Jeep all worked their way into what he owned, and the collection kept growing for more than 55 years.
Storage became part of the problem. Cars ended up outside and inside whatever farm buildings had room, including barns and old poultry buildings.
The collection had spread across the property long before there was a museum built to put it in one place.
Eventually there were more cars than the property could show, and some were harder to get to than others.
Wheels of Yesteryear opens in 2009
Wheels of Yesteryear Vintage Auto Museum opened on September 30, 2009, at 413 Hospitality Lane, just off U.S. 501 in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
The cars belong to the owner and his wife, and they still do.
By spring 2010, more than 40 vehicles were packed into the main display room.
A 1961 Chevrolet Bel Air, a 1964 Plymouth Belvedere, and a Barracuda were among the cars inside, while a 1970 Plymouth Superbird sat up front in the gift shop.
The place looked lived in.
Old license plates, posters, and other automotive material filled the walls, with music from the 1950s through the 1970s playing around the cars.
Even the building carried some family history: its wood came from the family's North Carolina farm.
Myrtle Beach Speedway was running directly behind the museum when it opened. The track lasted until 2020. The museum kept going.
More than 40 cars fit inside at first. The rest of the collection stayed where it had been.
The first winter swap
The museum hadn't been open 16 months when the first winter change was already underway.
More than 50 cars and trucks were on display in January 2011.
The owners had talked the previous summer about changing part of the lineup over winter, and by February some of that floor space was going to different cars.
Among them were a 1984 Pontiac Fiero Indy Pace Car and a 1969 Mercury Cyclone Spoiler II built as a Dan Gurney Special, one of 35 known to survive.
That is the trade the rotation makes.
A car that rare can spend part of a year near the Tanger Outlets, then give up its spot to something else from the collection.
The routine stuck. Close in January, swap, reopen in February.
Someone who paid to get in during the summer of 2010 and came back the next summer walked into a different museum.
What the 2018 floor showed
In 2018 the museum had about 40 cars on the floor from a collection already past 100.
Some were there for what was under the hood. A 1961 Chevrolet Biscayne carried a 409 and had no rear seat because it had been built for drag racing.
A 1964 Plymouth had a 415-horsepower Max Wedge. Two Challengers sat nearby, one Panther Pink with a 440 and one Green Go convertible with a Hemi.
The display reached beyond Mopar. There was a V-8 1973 AMC Gremlin X and a 1964 Buick Riviera rated at 360 horsepower.
Many hoods stayed open, so the engines were part of the exhibit.
The cars also carried evidence of how they had been kept. Repainted examples stayed with their original colors.
Some cars that had been raced had their interiors removed beforehand and reinstalled afterward, leaving a competition history inside a car that could still look complete on the museum floor.
One exception had appeared a couple of years earlier.
In 2016, the only displayed car the family didn't own was a 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona connected to "Joe Dirt," there on loan.
About a dozen cars changed each year. With more than 100 in the collection, most of what the family owned still stayed off the floor at any one time.
The addition that fell short
The plan in 2016 was bigger than another room.
The museum expected an addition by fall 2017 that would finally give the whole collection enough space to come out at once.
That deadline came and went. In September 2018 the expansion was still under construction.
The public count stayed near 50 through 2021 and 2022, and it was still around 50 in October 2023.
A visitor in February 2024 found the new wing still waiting to open. By August, the museum was advertising the expanded showroom.
The addition put 43 more cars and trucks in front of the public and brought the total on display to 93.
It was the largest single change to the museum since it opened, and it still left a large part of the collection elsewhere.
Wheels of Yesteryear in 2026
The museum closed on January 20, 2026, changed its inventory, and opened again on February 6 with a different floor.
There are 93 cars out and more than 150 in the collection, which leaves about 60 of them somewhere a ticket doesn't reach.
The ones that are out sit close together, often bumper to bumper.
The gift shop is still at the entrance, parking is still directly in front, and there is no guide: information sits with each car and people move at their own speed.
Most of the collection was bought by one man who started drag racing in high school and kept buying when the cars were cheap.
Anyone walking in this week is seeing part of it. In January the doors close, and what comes back out in February is a different part.
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