History

Emmett Dorsey supervised the Deele County sign shop for thirty-one years, during which every bent stop sign in the county eventually crossed his workbench. County policy required bent signs to be scrapped, a policy Dorsey followed in every respect except the scrapping. By his retirement in 1992, a pole barn on his property held over two hundred signs, each tagged and stored with a copy of the work order describing how it came to be bent: a grain truck's mirror, a reversing school bus, a mower operated too confidently, frost heave acting over nine winters.

In 1994, Dorsey purchased the former Kettner Implement showroom on the north edge of town for $21,000, drawn largely from his retirement savings, and opened the collection to the public. The Kettner Commercial Club's Museum Feasibility Subcommittee, formed for the occasion, endorsed the project and contributed $3,500 toward the building's roadside sign. The subcommittee's report survives, and concludes: 'The signs exist, the building exists, and Mr. Dorsey intends to do this regardless.'

The word 'National' was added in 1996, when the museum acquired a stop sign bent by a delivery van in Nevada, freight $61, making the collection formally interstate. No national body has objected. The museum's accession policy, posted at the entrance, requires documentation that is 'complete, verifiable, and uninteresting'; signs bent by tornadoes or collisions involving injury are declined as outside scope, and their owners are referred elsewhere with a form letter Dorsey describes as 'kind but firm.'

The collection's principal setback came in 1997, when spring flooding entered the storage annex and rusted some forty undisplayed signs past what the museum's condition standards call 'interpretive value.' They were deaccessioned in a single afternoon and, this time, actually scrapped. The main floor was unaffected, and today holds 343 signs arranged by cause of bend, the largest section being 'Backing, Various.'

Local Legends

Visitors repeat that Accession 141 was bent twice, seventeen years apart, by the same driver. The paperwork supports this, and the museum asks that people stop requesting the driver's name.

It is locally held that Dorsey can identify the responsible vehicle type from the bend alone. He has demonstrated this at Provenance Days with mixed results, which he attributes to newer bumper designs rather than any decline in the method.

Some claim the museum contains a single yield sign, kept out of public view. Staff will neither confirm this nor open the annex, and the accession ledger's one redacted line is pointed to as evidence by both sides.

The Controversy

In 2003, a state traffic-engineering reviewer noted that the museum's roadside sign — a full-size, deliberately unbent stop sign reading MUSEUM — was visible from the highway and could, at dusk, read as an actual stop sign, potentially violating the state manual on traffic control devices. Correspondence ran for seven months. The matter was resolved when the museum rotated the sign fifteen degrees away from the roadway, a compromise the reviewer's closing letter called 'adequate' and Dorsey's reply called 'the only sign here that's been bent on purpose.'

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