Tucked into the piñon-dotted hills on a short detour off Route 66 in New Mexico sits the Tinkertown Museum. At first, it looks like something that just grew out of the nearby Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque — a low-slung maze of wood, glass bottles and hand-painted signs. Every inch of it, from the miniature Western town to the three-ring circus, was imagined and built by one man: artist and carnival painter Ross Ward, who passed away in 2002.
Ward grew up in Aberdeen, South Dakota, the only child of parents with an eighth grade education. At 9 years old, a family trip to Knott’s Berry Farm in California changed everything. He fell in love with the Old West. It was obvious that he’d probably never be able to build a full-sized frontier town. So, he started small.
Carla Ward was his wife and the founder and co-owner of Tinkertown Museum. Now, it’s a nonprofit and she serves as its executive director.
“He knew he probably couldn't make a large Western town,” Carla Ward said. “So he made one in miniature, and he started making them at home in South Dakota when he was a teenager out of cereal boxes and cardboard boxes and things.”
Later, when Ross Ward was drafted into the Army, he turned those paper fantasies into something more durable.
“In 1960 is when he started making Tinkertown, in the Army, with real wood and making and carving the figures,” she added.
He started out with a general store, a blacksmith shop, a hotel, the Lucky Nugget Saloon.
“All of those displays, all of those dioramas in the Tinkertown Western Town, all were started by 1962,” Carla Ward said. “And then, he put all of those dioramas in a trailer, and would take them around to state fairs where he was painting carnival rides and signs.”
In 1981, the Wards decided the traveling Western town needed a permanent home. They chose a four-room summer cabin in Sandia Park, perched on the road to the Sandia Crest. They built the museum around the house, adding walls made from some 55,000 glass bottles — a shimmering skin that catches the high-desert light and hints that something unusual waits inside.
Tinkertown opened in 1983 with only about 25 visitors per year and a suggested donation of $1. But it caught on. Today, more than 28,000 people come each year, taking the five-mile detour to find what guidebooks now call one of the last true roadside attractions on the Mother Road.
“I think Tinkertown offers something, authentically, that's been in the past,” Carla Ward said. “People are really hungry for the old-time roadside attraction or some place they can discover as they're driving along: ‘That looks really interesting. Let's stop there.’”
Route 66 has marked its 100th anniversary throughout 2026. The official day of celebration is Nov. 11. While fanfare and celebrations took place across the long drive from Chicago to Los Angeles, Carla Ward noticed that some of the curiosity and shine surrounding road trips have given way to more mundane efficiency, along with some disrepair.
“It's these kinds of places that are being lost because [of] the roads, the freeways bypassing many towns,” she added. “People aren't taking the back roads as much, but they really want to, and so we really feel that we need to find something unique and authentic, and to discover.”
But there are still those who get behind the wheel and hope to find something unexpected and thrilling. Tinkertown did not disappoint the visitors who came, weaving their way toward a project Ross Ward worked on part-time for two decades. There’s a three-ring big top circus tent with sideshow acts, hand-carved wagons and vintage circus banners he collected from around the country.
Elsewhere, a gallery holds a surprisingly tender exhibit: 165 antique wedding-cake couples, toppers collected over about 10 years after the Wards found a single figurine for their own cake.
Outside, a full-sized wooden sailboat seems to have washed up in the high desert. It belonged to Carla Ward’s brother, Fritz Damler, who spent 10 years circling the globe, and doing it without modern electronics. When he couldn’t sell the aging boat, the family hauled it to Tinkertown, where it’s now paired with a hand-painted world map charting his journey.
Ross Ward was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at 57. He died at age 62. By then, the world he imagined was already complete.
His legacy isn’t just the museum. Carla Ward said that it poses a quiet dare to every visitor: if you can dream it, you just might be able to build it. Or, as her husband liked to tell visitors, “I did all this while you were watching TV!”
For 5-year-old Penelope Rose Thomasini, visiting from Bend, Oregon, the fortune teller was a highlight.
“She wrote my fortune,” Penelope said. She also enjoyed the moving figures in the dollhouses, though the accordion music was “too much.”
The museum’s marvels can leave adults just as astonished. Elijah, who visited with his family from nearby Tijeras, was struck by the scale of Ross Ward’s dedication.
“I can’t wrap my head around the dedication this guy had and how long it took him,” Elijah said. “I think it’s insane.”
Tanya Ward Goodman is Ross Ward’s daughter and the author of “Leaving Tinkertown,” a memoir of the journey she shared with her father as he lived with Alzheimer’s disease. Ward Goodman believes Tinkertown helped ease the challenges of his disease process and enabled him to put a final mark on his legacy.
“Walking through the museum is like walking through his head and his heart, and you really know him and you really love him, even if you didn’t meet him on this temporal- on a physical plane,” she said.
“I think it's an energy, the idea that you could create what you want and follow your sort of passion and desire to create the type of life you want. I think that is a very valuable lesson,” she said. “And, I think that idea of ‘yes’ is really my dad’s legacy.”
