Part of the old K-Mart building on Airport Way still works the way it has for a few years now, as an Amazon fulfillment center, with delivery vans cycling through one half of the structure. Walk through a different door and you're standing in front of a lineup of restored automobiles from before the Second World War, and past them, in what used to be retail floor space, a rebuilt Norseman airplane hangs under museum lighting.
This is the new home of the Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum, merged since this summer with the former Pioneer Air Museum, and as of late September the museum is still not finished moving in.
Two Collections, Two Buildings, One Problem
For most of its run, the Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum lived inside the Wedgewood Resort off College Road, where it opened in 2009 and built a reputation good enough that TripAdvisor users have repeatedly ranked it among the top things to do in Fairbanks. Its aviation counterpart had a rougher path to opening its doors. The Interior and Arctic Alaska Aeronautical Foundation, the nonprofit behind the Pioneer Air Museum, was organized in 1977 by Randy Acord, Corky Corkran, Everett Long, and Dr. William Wood, and got permission to use Pioneer Park's Gold Dome in 1984. Structural problems with the dome kept the museum from opening for years. It finally welcomed visitors in 1992, after the recovered wreckage of Ben Eielson's Hamilton H-45 went on display.
Eielson flew the first air mail route in Alaska in 1924 and died five years later in a crash while delivering supplies to a ship trapped in ice in the Bering Sea. That wreckage, along with a restored Norseman airplane, made the trip across town this year to become part of the new combined collection.
Two institutions, two buildings, two waiting lists of donated aircraft and vintage cars that had outgrown their space. Fountainhead Development president Tim Cerny put the timeline simply: "We started this project during COVID, working with the Pioneer Aviation Museum." The plan to consolidate was announced publicly in November 2024.
What the New Space Actually Holds
The old auto museum building ran about 30,000 square feet. The new facility at 3121 Airport Way, once occupied by K-Mart, comes in at roughly 90,000 square feet, three times the footprint the auto collection had before. That extra room is the entire reason this move happened. As of the most recent update from Alaska's News Source on September 24, the display floor holds about 120 vehicles and six aircraft.
Neither number is the ceiling. The full vehicle collection runs to roughly 135 automobiles, so what's on the floor right now is most of it, not all of it. The aviation side is growing even faster relative to plan: when the museum announced its build-out in April, the goal was to open with five assembled planes and expand toward eight or nine over time. Five months later, six are already on display.
The building itself carries its own history worth knowing if you're driving past and wondering why a museum shares a parking lot with delivery trucks. It was a K-Mart before Amazon leased part of it as a fulfillment center, and it's that same shell, retrofitted with a restoration bay, climate-controlled artifact storage, a gift shop, and a catering kitchen for events, that now holds one of the state's most recognized car collections.
The Story Only One Roof Can Tell
The decision to combine two collections wasn't only about square footage. Cerny has said the appeal was connecting stories that used to sit in separate buildings, cars and aircraft that moved people and freight through the same stretch of early Alaska history, from the horseless carriage era through the years leading into World War II.
Richard Wien, whose family name carries weight in Alaska aviation circles, made the case for why the airplane side matters as much as the cars: "Nowhere in the continental United States did the airplane play such a significant role as it did in Alaska." Fountainhead manager Willard Vinton has talked about the new building becoming a fixed stop for tour operators rather than an optional add-on: "I think eventually it will get to the point where the tour buses, that'll be a destination."
One detail that tells you how the museum's owners think about their own brand: even with airplanes now filling a third of the building, they chose to keep calling it the Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum rather than rename it around the merger. Two decades of name recognition, built one visitor at a time, wasn't something Cerny wanted to trade for a more accurate label.
The old Wedgewood building isn't sitting empty either. Plans call for converting that 30,000-square-foot space into a conference and event center able to handle gatherings of up to 800 people, which means the resort loses a museum but gains a much larger events venue than the museum ever needed.
Still Unpacking
What makes this a story worth checking in on now, rather than filing away as old news from last year's announcement, is that the museum opened before it was finished. The soft opening landed on July 13, and the display floor has kept changing since. Recent visitor photos and reviews describe staff still positioning vehicles and setting up new sections months after doors opened, which lines up with a collection that's still working its way from roughly 120 vehicles toward its full count near 135, and from six aircraft toward a stated goal of eight or nine.
That incremental pace isn't a complaint. A museum unpacking one aircraft or one restored car at a time, in public, while visitors are already walking through, is a different experience than a museum that opens once, fully staged. If you visited in August, you likely saw a different floor plan than you'd see this week, and the floor plan next spring will look different again as the aviation wing fills out.
For anyone who grew up visiting the auto collection at Wedgewood or touring the Gold Dome at Pioneer Park with a school group, the move changes more than the address. The Gold Dome's aviation pieces, including the Eielson wreckage and the Norseman, now sit inside a building three times larger than the auto museum's old home, alongside restored automobiles from the same collection locals have been visiting for over fifteen years. The building started out selling hardware. It's currently split between fulfilling online orders and holding a state historical collection few other places in the country can match. Worth a stop the next time you're driving Airport Way, even if half the exhibits weren't there on your last visit.
If a museum on the edge of a fulfillment center can turn into one of Fairbanks' better weekend stops, it says something about how much this town keeps reshaping itself in plain sight. Leaders Real Estate Team pays attention to those changes because they shape what it means to live here, not just what it means to buy here.
