About International Towing & Recovery Hall of Fame and Museum
Chattanooga is home to an international museum for tow trucks. Not automobiles in general. Not transportation broadly. Tow trucks. The International Towing & Recovery Hall of Fame and Museum preserves the machinery, people, inventions, and history of the industry responsible for dragging disabled vehicles out of places they no longer belong.
The location makes sense once the history is known. Chattanooga is credited by the museum as the birthplace of the American towing industry, where Ernest Holmes Sr. developed an early practical wrecker system after confronting the difficulty of recovering wrecked automobiles. His work led to patented towing equipment and a manufacturing business that helped turn improvised vehicle recovery into a specialized industry.
The museum now displays more than twenty tow trucks and wreckers spanning much of the history of motor vehicles, along with tools, toys, equipment, photographs, memorabilia, and a Hall of Fame honoring people from the towing and recovery field. Some of the preserved machines look like ordinary antique trucks until the complicated booms, cranes, cables, and lifting systems behind their cabs reveal their actual purpose.
There are museums dedicated to famous cars, trains, aircraft, and racing machines. Chattanooga built one around the vehicles that arrive after those machines stop working. That makes the museum both legitimately historical and wonderfully specific, especially when an entire showroom of antique wreckers is waiting behind the door.