Florence Army Airfield - more commonly Florence Field - was a U.S. Army Air Forces training base during World War II. Cadets learned to fly fighters here: P-39 Airacobras and P-40 Warhawks. Attack pilots trained in A-20 Havocs and A-26 Invaders. After the war the field was returned to civilian use, becoming the Florence Regional Airport, and Griffin - who had served as executive director of the airport after the war - saw a way to preserve some of what was being retired. The military's willingness to fly aircraft in and walk away made the collection possible. The airfield's long runways could accept the largest hardware coming out of front-line service. The museum became, briefly, one of the most aircraft-rich roadside attractions in the Carolinas.

At its peak the museum's outdoor display included the B-29 Sweet Eloise (originally Miss Marilyn Gay), the YF-102A Delta Dagger prototype, an F-101F Voodoo, an F-104B Starfighter, an F-86H Sabre, an F-89J Scorpion, a NTB-47B Stratojet, a Boeing KC-97G Stratofreighter, a Martin RB-57A Canberra, a Sikorsky H-19 Chickasaw, a CH-21 Workhorse helicopter, and a Grumman HU-16 Albatross amphibian. The missile collection ran from Regulus to Honest John to Matador to Titan I - the long-rod nuclear ballistic missile that briefly stood threat-ready in Air Force silos in the late 1950s. A Navy NC-121K Constellation that had flown the final United States Navy Constellation mission in 1982, with Tactical Electronic Warfare Squadron 33 out of NAS Key West, came to rest at Florence the same year. For aviation geeks driving 301 between Christmas vacations and family reunions, the museum was the unmissable detour.

Interstate 95 changed the math. The interstate opened in pieces through the 1960s, and once it was complete, traffic that had been creeping past the museum on U.S. 301 began flying past at seventy miles an hour, miles away. Visitor numbers declined through the 1970s and 1980s. The museum closed for a year in the mid-1980s, reopened, and limped on. Then, in early 1997, the FAA announced that the land was needed for a new airport entrance. There was no resisting that. The museum closed on October 8, 1997. Newspapers covered the slow dispersal that followed - Morning News articles in 1998 headlined "Missile Man Won't Let Air Museum Die" - but the salvage crews came in, the aircraft were prepped for transport, and the collection scattered.

Much of the surviving collection ended up at the newly established Carolinas Aviation Museum in Charlotte: the Regulus I cruise missile, the YF-102A Delta Dagger, the CH-34A Choctaw, the F-101F Voodoo, parts of a KC-97G used to complete another, the Honest John tactical rocket. The F-104B Starfighter went to the Kansas Cosmosphere in Hutchinson. The HH-43 Huskie went to the Museum of Aviation at Robins AFB in Georgia. The B-29 Sweet Eloise ended up at the main gate of Dobbins Air Reserve Base outside Atlanta. The NTB-47B Stratojet went to the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum in Pooler, Georgia. The Grumman C-1A Trader and F-11A Tiger went to the Grissom Air Museum in Indiana. The B-29's nose ended up in a private collection in Charlotte. The Grumman HU-16 Albatross was sold to a private owner in Corpus Christi who intended to return it to flight.

Not everything found a home. The KC-97G stratofreighter was scrapped for parts. The Douglas WB-66D Destroyer was scrapped outright. The Titan I ballistic missile - a full-size example of an early Cold War American intercontinental nuclear missile - was also scrapped, a loss that aviation historians still mourn. The A-26 Invader was scrapped for parts. The Waco CG-4 glider skeleton's current location is simply unknown. A roadside museum is by its nature precarious; it depends on weather kindness, civic patience, traveling families with curious kids, and a highway that wants to slow down. Florence Air & Missile Museum had all of these for thirty-four Christmases. Then the highway went somewhere else.