Step right up! Enter Peter Excho’s museum of the strange and curious

AUGUSTA — Let there be no doubt: With his wild eyebrows, rampant mustache, pierced septum and manhole-inspired earrings, Peter Excho is an historian. You won’t find him holding forth on the rise of the pyramids, the fall of Rome or the spread of settlers across America.

But ask him about that poop in a bottle.

“President Lincoln’s,” Excho said recently. He stood in a shadowy corner of Pexcho’s American Dime Museum, an old building containing old things of mysterious origin. “This was his last poop.”

Yes, the Great Emancipator’s final, uh, movement is preserved for all eternity in downtown Augusta. Or so Excho says. But who knows? The contents of his compendium of the weird and wondrous are of murky provenance. Did that shrunken head really come from a jungle? Was that stuffed parakeet born with two heads?

And just what, really, are spotted cube-ular eggs?

Ah, for that, my friend, you have to pay. That brings us to the “dime” part of the museum’s name— and it gives Excho a chance to prove that he knows his history.

Credit: Nell Carroll for Journal-Constitution

Credit: Nell Carroll for Journal-Constitution

Dime museums came by their name honestly, even if everything they contained weren’t always as advertised. For the price of one thin little dime, people could gape at wonders from across the globe. Mummified mermaids! Dragon fossils! Calcified sea worms! In 19th- and early 20th century America, a public eager for entertainment found diversion in little museums across the country. A good dime museum boasted an inventory of marvels, as well as folks who could swallow swords, eat fire or drive nails through their noses.

“They were for the working class,” said Excho.

But technology doomed the dime museum. The growth of filmmaking edged out the little warehouses of wonder. In cities large and small, the dime museums shuttered, went dark. By the mid-1900s, they were hardly more than footnotes in American history.

Now, says Excho, his museum, on 6th Street in Augusta, is the last. He is a keeper of American history. It just sort of happened.

“I guess this is in my blood,” Excho said. “I had no idea I was collecting a dime museum.”

Maybe it collected him.

Coming to Augusta

You enter the dime museum through a wooden door with edges that have been rounded by time and use. It opens into a building that once housed auto parts. In the lobby is a shiny coffee bar, a scattering of chairs, some trinkets for sale. On its walls are signs that promise treasures beyond the next door.

On any afternoon, younger versions of himself — Aden, 18, a rising freshman at Augusta University; Theija, 13 and in the eighth grade; and Billiey, 10, a fifth-grader and aspiring sword swallower — are likely to be inside.

“I know that time is very limited on this planet,” said Excho, 57. “Not many people are lucky enough to have their children at work.”

He’d need a bigger building if all his kids were to work with their old man. Excho, twice married, twice divorced, is the father of eight.

Excho rolled into Augusta in 2019 after packing up a similar enterprise in Baton Rouge. He brought his three youngest, plus John Lawrence “Red” Stuart, a sword swallower with whom he’d crossed paths in Louisiana.

Augusta, said Excho, checked every box for an entertainer with a growing collection of oddities. It was warm — a native of Buffalo, N.Y., Excho has had it with snow — and he liked the city’s unhurried, laid-back vibe. “We got here, and it was raining,” he said. “People were walking — walking! — in the rain.”

And this: The price was right. Excho rented space in the old building and later bought the structure when the owner decided to sell. No longer worried about a rent hike or getting kicked out by a landlord, Excho concentrated on expanding his collection. The world’s market, the internet, beckoned. Excho estimates he has about 30% of his stuff on display at any time in the 4,000-square-foot space.

Is he a hoarder? Excho scoffed. “Everything here, it’s in order.”

Theija piped up to defend her dad. “It’s not like where you can’t move around.”

Credit: Nell Carroll for Journal-Constitution

For Excho, amassing and displaying his possessions is the latest step in a career that encompassed the electrical industry, the Air Force, photography, the tattoo trade – he’s never, Excho said, duplicated a tattoo; each is an original – and volunteering at a Baltimore dime museum that’s gone out of business. That led him to open his own emporium in Baton Rouge.

The one constant in his peripatetic path: art — always, art. His poster creations, many black and white, all whimsical, dot the walls of his museum.

There are T-shirts bearing the proprietor’s likeness. It’s a spectacle of sportswear and can be yours, my friend, for a mere $15.50.

‘All the weirdness’

Dime museums, like any profit-making enterprise, arose to answer a need, said James Cherry, an associate professor and chair of the theater department at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Cherry is a scholar of U.S. popular culture in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries.

After the Civil War, said Cherry, America’s elite turned to “temples of art and culture” — places where serious thoughts were shared, where noble ideas flowered.

But, as entertainer P.T. Barnum knew, there remained an insatiable appetite to eyeball shrunken heads and two-headed calves. “What are you going to do with all the weirdness?” Cherry asked. “That’s where the idea of the dime museum comes in.”

Dime museums popped up in cities across America. Factory workers, plumbers, carpenters — and, yes, swells in top hats and spats — lined up to gape at artifacts purported to have come from every corner of the globe. Augmenting all that oddness: musical performances, lectures and so-called freak shows — the human pin cushion! The bearded lady! Tiny humans!

Dime museums “were meant for everybody,” Cherry said.

When cinema came along, people who once invested a dime looking at desiccated mysteries decided to spend cash marveling at images on a screen in a darkened room.

Is Excho’s inventory of wonders the last? Cherry doesn’t know. And does it matter?

“We live in a world where everything is about downloaded content,” he said. “To go into a dusty storefront (and see) displays of weirdness, there’s definitely still an appeal to that.”

That brings us back, my friend, to the curiosities on 6th Street.

Credit: Nell Carroll for Journal-Constitution

A wonder from long ago!

His mother-in-law was coming to town. Cory Keich logged on to his computer to find some holiday distractions for Peggy Blevins during her visit. Two days after Christmas, they found themselves at Excho’s door.

“It was really cool,” said Keich, 46, of Grovetown, a dozen miles west of Augusta. “It was more than I thought it would be.”

Their host, his mustache waxed pencil-point sharp, gave Keich, his wife, 10-year-old daughter and mother-in-law a history lesson while simultaneously entertaining them, Keich said. They stayed three hours.

His favorite part? “It was the learning,” Keich said, noting that his kid was just as intrigued as he. “It was learning what the dime museums used to be like, and what it is today.”

They went from room to room, concluding with Stuart’s sword-swallowing act. As a bonus, Stuart hammered a nail into his nose. You can’t ask for much more than that.

As for whether it’s real or not, Keich doesn’t belabor the question. “It’s up to your imagination.”

Imagination is in short supply, Excho thinks. He blames “corporate America” for creating museums that prohibit gasps of wonder and discourage exclamations.

The dime museums, he said, encouraged wide eyes — and, yessir, wider wallets.

He’s hoping folks come back, money in hand, because an enterprise that relies on foot traffic needs just that — feet. The pandemic just about killed his dime museum. With visitors dwindling to nearly none, Excho looked around for alternate employment. He found it with the movie industry, where he could ply his skills in electricity and making sets. That sustained him and his offspring until COVID-19’s threat eased and people started venturing out again.

With a new year just begun, Excho and his kids are putting the finishing touches on an exhibit sure to stop you in your tracks. When it was alive, this lizard was as terrible as anything that walked the earth. In fact, it was twice as dreadful! That’s because this oddity from millions of years ago had two ..

Well, words cannot adequately convey the wonder inside the old building in downtown Augusta. You’ll just have to see it for yourself.

Peter Excho, historian without peer, is awaiting your call. Maybe, my friend, he’ll reveal the origin of those spotted cube-ular eggs.