Paul A. Johnson Pencil Sharpener Museum

The story

When Reverend Paul Johnson retired in 1988, his wife Charlotte handed him two metal car-shaped pencil sharpeners to spark a quiet hobby. She probably figured he would accumulate a modest row of miniature convertibles. Instead, Johnson spent the next two decades obsessively hunting down thousands of distinct sharpeners—insisting on zero duplicates—and filling a dedicated wooden shed in his backyard until his death in 2010.

In 2011, the entire operation was transplanted to the Hocking Hills Regional Welcome Center off State Route 664. They didn't just pack the display cases into boxes; workers hoisted the actual backyard shed onto a flatbed truck, drove it to Logan, and used pre-move photographs to place every tiny president, tractor, and brass trumpet back onto its exact shelf. The hoard expanded again in late 2022 when the widow of collector Frank Parades donated his 1,500-piece collection—including rare Spanish Play-Me models—pushing the total count toward 5,000 individual crank-and-blade miniatures.