Booth Western Art Museum

A startlingly substantial museum for a town this size: 120,000 square feet of galleries dedicated to art and artefacts of the American West. The core is 19th- and 20th-century Western painting and sculpture — Frederic Remington, Charles Russell, Albert Bierstadt, the cowboy-and-Indian school — but the museum also includes Civil War galleries, a Presidential Gallery with handwritten letters from every US president, and one of the best Western illustration collections in the country.

It is the kind of museum you do not expect to find off an exit on I-75, and it justifies a special detour. Allow at least half a day; an audio guide is included and worth using.

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A story
The museum was founded in 2003 around the private collection of an anonymous local donor and has grown into a Smithsonian Institution affiliate. It is the largest museum in the United States devoted exclusively to art of the American West — a strange specialism for a small Georgia town more than two thousand kilometres from the actual frontier.