American Toby Jug Museum in Evanston set to close. 'Our mission has been to share and to educate'

The American Toby Jug Museum in Evanston, for decades a destination for scores of ceramic enthusiasts and fans of oddball Midwestern attractions, will close its doors next spring.

The museum's founding dates to roughly 1947, when Stephen Mullins purchased his first set of six small jugs as a 15-year-old, using the last of the money he had at summer camp. They were the first in a collection that would become the bulk of the museum’s inventory of 8,000-plus jugs, mugs and thimbles — the largest collection of its kind in the world.

Since 2005, visitors have perused jugs resembling Winston Churchill, Bugs Bunny and more ephemeral cultural figures, such as the Budweiser frogs from a long-forgotten ad campaign, said Kevin Pearson, who has been the collection's main curator and tour guide since Mullins’ death in 2019.

Mullins left money to fund the museum for five years after his death, according to Pearson, who said he believes Mullins' intention was to allow his family ample time to figure out what to do with the knickknacks.

“I think he would have loved it if someone came along to take it over, and there has been wonderful interest from his family in keeping it going the five years,” Pearson said. “But it really is a lot of work.”

Some of the items in the collection date to the 1700s, when the first Toby jugs were crafted, and others are rare enough to fetch tens of thousands of dollars from collectors. But the vast majority are worth perhaps a few hundred dollars, Pearson said.

The Toby jug had been a working-class collectible since those earliest days. And while Mullins made millions as a real estate developer, his tastes were never snobbish, said his daughter, Beth Mullins Scales, who works in an office a few floors above the museum at 900 Chicago Ave.

“There are things here that look like you could have bought in a Hallmark store in 1985, and some of them are almost 200 years old,” she said. “He made lifelong friends who were collectors, he traveled all over the world to shows. He just liked finding something in some little antique shop that he didn’t have.”

On a recent afternoon, Mullins Scales was in the midst of a yearslong project to photograph each of the museum’s jugs — with pictures from five different angles — and estimated the museum would close for good in March. It’s likely thousands of jugs will be listed with a broker who will manage occasional sales so as not to depress the global Toby jug market.

Family members will snag a few sentimental favorites and have been trying to sell or gift jugs to collectors who will appreciate them most, Mullins Scales said. Recently, the widow of Gene Kelly reached out to request a Toby jug similar to one shown in a picture of Kelly on the set of a pirate movie.

“Of course we had one, or at least one very like it,” Scales Mullins said. “People keep asking us if we’re sad to be closing down, but our mission has been to share and to educate. The idea that these pieces will land with people who really want them makes us feel kind of good.”