This Crowley museum may be the only one in Louisiana where you can find a city hall tucked inside. Located in the historic downtown of this rice-farming hub, Crowley’s City Hall is also home to a museum filled with vintage cars, musical history, and artifacts of regional pride.
“It was not only a way to kind of preserve the history in Crowley,” said Claire Doré, historian with the Acadia Parish Library, “but a grant for the museum saved that history and also provided space for city hall.” Rather than placing a museum inside a government building, Crowley essentially built a government office into a museum.
reviving downtown with history
Crowley’s downtown, once quiet after a mid-20th century oil boom pulled businesses away to nearby Lafayette, is seeing new life. According to Dore’, it began with the reopening of the 1901 Grand Opera House of the South, followed by the transformation of the old Ford Motor Company building into the City Hall Museum.
Doré notes that the shift led to preservation. “As people came in and started purchasing these buildings, uncovering the windows and redoing things, they realized how much of the old stuff we still had left and that everything was pretty well intact.” Ironically, the downtown’s period of decline helped protect its architectural history.
crowley city hall museum filled with relics
The Crowley Motor Company building itself is a relic. A few steps from the mayor’s office, visitors can see antique cars—two Model T Fords and a Model A—the types of cars being assembled here in the 1920s. Car parts were shipped in by rail. Dore’ explains that Crowley was chosen as an assembly site because it already had paved streets, a rarity at the time.
Model T sedan on display inside Crowley City Hall & Museum.
a musical legacy at the crowley museum
Among the museum’s standout exhibits is the sound studio display, a tribute to J.D. Miller, the music producer who operated a local recording studio beginning in the 1940s. On display are vintage reel-to-reel tape recorders, mixing boards, turntables, and instruments once used to record Cajun, Zydeco, Swamp Pop, and Country music.
Miller wrote the song, “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” which became the first chart-topping country hit by a solo female artist, Kitty Wells. The song added to Crowley’s contributions to southern music history.
The museum also highlights rice farming, the area’s economic backbone, and features photographs from more than 80 years of the International Rice Festival.
“I just want people to kind of walk away saying, wow, I never knew that was there. What a cool little place to visit,” Doré says. In Crowley, history isn’t just remembered—it’s part of how the town runs.
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getting there
The Ford Motor Company Museum and Crowley City Hall are located at 425 N. Parkerson Avenue, Crowley, LA. Phone: (337) 788-4100.
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