One of America’s most extensive collections of decommissioned tanks and other military vehicles got its start in 1982 when a Washington lobbyist turned history buff bought an Army jeep.

Once you start collecting mobile military artifacts, Allan Cors said, it’s hard to stop. .

Cors, a former top lobbyist for the glass and ceramics giant Corning Inc., purchased his first tank: an M5 Stuart.

Cors said.

Cors now owns at least 80 military vehicles, including a vintage M1917, the United States’ first mass-produced tank, and one of the few operational World War II-era M4 Sherman tanks.

The farm is now the site of an annual Tank Day.

Museum CEO Dennis G.

Brant said the goal is for visitors to make physical connections to the military vehicles, the ultimate interactive experience. .

The museum also hosts an oral history project to document the stories of front-line military personnel, rear-area soldiers and even families back home. .

But it’s the veterans who make all that possible,” said Dennis Gill, who heads the museum’s Voices of Freedom project.

Cors said, he realized that merely accumulating military hardware wasn’t the main point of his collection. 

The collection also houses a British Centurion tank, a landing craft for Marines in World War II, and a pair of odd-looking Swedish S-Tanks, which don’t have turrets and aim by shifting the entire vehicle toward the intended target. 

“This is my circus, and these are my monkeys,” said Marc Sehring, operations manager at the Tank Farm. 

He said children tend to look at the assorted tanks and armored personnel carriers as merely big things to climb

Sehring said

Sehring said they hope to add more recent American tanks eventually, including the M48 that U.S