The Lunch Box Museum
Columbus Collective Museums is proud to be home to the largest Lunch Box Museum in the world, featuring over 5,000 items, including metal lunch boxes, thermoses, and trays!
Lunch boxes throughout history
Our unique museum has been featured by the Smithsonian Magazine. Stop by and see this local treasure and our other eclectic museums today.
How the lunch box museum got started
Columbus, Georgia native, Allen Woodall purchased his first lunch boxes from The Lakewood Fairgrounds in Atlanta in 1985; The Green Hornet and Dick Tracy lunch boxes were the first in his collection. He found the lunch boxes to be one of the greatest forms of pop art, and it was the art that would keep Woodall on the hunt to accumulate more, and more boxes to add to his growing gallery.
From museum to literature
After a few years of compiling these miniature masterpieces, Woodall decided to write a book. He hoped his book would inspire others and promote the hobby of collecting metal lunch boxes.
The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Metal Lunch Boxes was published in 1990 and re-released in 2000. The book was Woodall’s way of sharing information about lunch box manufacturers, care, and cleaning instructions, carry-alls, and even advertising and original art. Today, there are over 5,000 pieces in The World-Famous Lunch Box Museum, where people come from all over the world to take a walk down memory lane.
You can check out the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Metal Lunch Boxes here!