27. August 2025
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Museums & Exhibitions

The Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum (Gatlinburg)

Florian Buechtingby Florian Buechting

The Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum

3.35 USD incl. tax
The Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum
5

Rating

 5.0/5

Flyctory.com Pros

  • Huge and very entertaining exhibition
  • Good structure
  • Low admission

My summer 2025 Six US States and Nashville trip did give me a nice mixture of bucket list visits and interesting places. I visited a rather obscure and unique place on the seventh day of the road trip. Gatlinburg hosts The Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum

 

The Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum – Location & Admission

The Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum is located East of the city center of Gatlinburg. You can easily walk there from the Downtown attractions. If you arrive by car, you should be aware that there is frequent congestion in the city. Once you made it, there is a sufficiently large free parking lot right in front of the museum. You could also use the Gatlinburg buses. Lines 3 and 4 stop at Winery Square, more or less right in front of the attraction.

The museum is opening daily from 10:00 to 16:00. On Sundays, the doors close at 14:00 already. Despite the building is rather small, I spent some 45 minutes there. Adult admission is 3 USD (3.35 incl. tax).

 

The Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum – The Visit

You can describe The Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum with one key fact: 20,000 pairs of shakers. That’s what you get on all the shelves you pass during the museum visit. Once you entered the exhibition space, there is a welcome video, introducing you to the owner and the mission of the museum. The exhibits are grouped by topics. for example, you initially run into Christmas-themed pairs of spice dispensers. However, some topics featured are also regional (like Mexico) or very different focuses like Vegetables. On the sides of the shelves, there is some limited documentation – how could you provide more having such a volume of items in display?

I feel that the pictures (even though they just show a fraction of the exhibits) speak for themselves and what you get at a visit. I was really surprised that in the city section, even my home town Cologne has been featured.  There is a fixed / recommended route through the different rooms of the museum. At one of the final moments of your visit, you enter The Vault. This room features the most unique and valuable salt and pepper shakers of the museum. Thereafter, you pass some displays how the spices are produced and where the visitors of the most recent years have been traveling from.

 

The Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum – Services

The staff in The Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum is lovely and assists you when you have questions. The museum store features a wide variety of… salt and pepper shakers. However, there are – of course – also other, more “traditional” souvenirs in case the museum did not inspire you in that way.

 

The Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum – My View

The Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum is almost a prototype of a museum I love to visit during my travels. The topic is a bit of strange and nerdy, the presentation is very good. Despite the sheer number of shakers in that building feels overwhelming, it is also entertaining. You might miss to give the right attention to 90 per cent of the stuff they got – but you still leave with a smile. Especially compared to other US places, the admission is unbeatable. In my point of view, you simply have to visit this place when you are in the Great Smoky Mountains.

 

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