A Small Town in Alaska Is Home to the World’s First Hammer Museum | Travel

Imagine a hammer. Chances are the implement that comes to mind has a wooden handle—maybe rubber—leading to a metal head, with a claw in the back. You’ve got the picture? OK. Now forget it—because the 2,500 hammers (with another 8,000 in storage) at the Hammer Museum in Haines, Alaska, defy common knowledge.

The four-room museum traces the origin of humankind’s first tool back through centuries of history, from the present-day to the industrial age to colonial times and beyond recognition. A rock hammer believed by paleontologists to have crafted the Pyramid of Menkaure in Egypt, a Roman battle-ax infantry soldiers used as a weapon, billposter hammers used to tack up advertisements, bankteller’s hammers of the late 1800s used to cancel checks before the advent of the hole puncher, and small mallet drink hammers bar-goers in New York’s 1960s used to summon a refill or offer applause hang on the walls and rest in glass cases.

“There’s something for everybody here at the Hammer Museum,” says Dave Pahl, the museum’s founder and a lifelong collector. His collection shows that every profession, somewhere along the line, utilized a specific hammer. “Everybody uses a hammer, but a lot of us don’t even realize how often, or where we’d be without it.”

Pahl, originally from Ohio, came to Alaska in 1980 to become a homesteader. He and his wife settled in Haines, a small town of about 2,000 people in Southeast Alaska, where they built an off-grid cabin and raised their children in a lifestyle of self-sufficiency. His fascination for tools motivated him to collect hammers at estate sales and, later, on eBay. “Family vacations were hammer hunting,” Pahl says with a squinting smile. Eventually, his personal collection outgrew his home.

“We have a one-room log house we live in, and I had hammers hanging all over the walls,” Pahl says. “Then this building came up for sale, and I was getting a lot of pressure from [my wife] Carol to get…