Lloyd Harkins Collection, Montana

Lloyd Harkins collected things in his yard for much of his life. He worked as a mining engineer, and hated to see things scrapped, so he bought or acquired what he could, bringing it to his home, with an 8-acre yard, next to highway 41, in the small town of Silver Star, Montana. Some of the items in his collection are impressively rusty, large, and historic (such as the pulley wheel used to haul the 168 dead men out of the Speculator Mine in Butte, in 1917), and have been used as props for films (like Kevin Costner’s The Postman). Some of it was sold as props for Disney theme parks. He was planning to open a mining museum, but never got around to it. Harkins died in 2016.