The Idaho Potato Museum

There is a museum in Blackfoot, Idaho, dedicated entirely to the potato. That sentence deserves a moment to settle in.

Blackfoot sits in Bingham County, one of the leading potato-growing counties in the United States. The high-desert volcanic soil of the Snake River Plain, combined with the cold nights that slow growth and concentrate starch, yields a russet Burbank with qualities no other region can fully replicate. The Idaho potato became one of the most recognizable agricultural brands in America, and Blackfoot became its unofficial capital.

The building housing the museum was originally constructed between nineteen twelve and nineteen thirteen as the Oregon Short Line Railroad Depot, a subsidiary of Union Pacific. Trains moved potatoes, cattle, and settlers through here for decades. When that economy shifted, local residents who made their livelihood growing and processing potatoes decided the depot should tell their story.

The museum held a trial opening in the summer of nineteen eighty-eight as a community experiment. The organizers were not sure whether a museum built around a single vegetable could attract visitors. It could. The experiment became permanent, and the museum opened to tourists the following year.

Inside, visitors find a timeline of potato consumption in the United States, a collection of antique peelers and mashers, a replica of a pioneer potato cellar, and displays tracing the global journey of the potato from its origins in the Andes of South America to the farms of southeastern Idaho. There is also the world's largest potato chip: a Pringle measuring twenty-five inches long and fourteen inches wide, donated by Pringles, a Procter and Gamble brand. It is here in Blackfoot, which is exactly where something like that belongs.

The museum is free with a baked potato. That is not a metaphor. They hand you a baked potato when you pay admission.