Beginning in mid-April, national travel experts with USA Today nominated 20 museums in a variety of categories. Votes could be cast each day for one month.
At the end, the NIM was named the victor in two categories: Best Free Museum and Best History Museum. The museum previously won first place in the Best Free Museum category in 2016 and 2020.
While no prizes are awarded, the bragging rights are extremely valuable for the nonprofit museum that hasn’t been open to the public since March 2020, National Infantry Museum Foundation President Pete Jones said in a news release.
“What that means is that the museum has made such an impression on the millions of people who have visited it that it stays top of mind, even when a visit is impossible,” Jones said.
Since opening in 2009, the NIM, often called “the Smithsonian of the Army,” has won a global award from the Themed Entertainment Industry, been included in a CNN Travel article about the 12 best military museums in the world and is consistently ranked as one of the state’s top attractions on TripAdvisor.
The NIM is a free museum with immersive exhibits that take visitors through a 240-year history lesson of what it means to be a United States soldier. It preserves and displays one of the largest collections of military artifacts in the world, with 190,000 square feet of galleries standing on a 200-acre tract outside of Fort Benning.
As a non-profit, the NIM relies solely on donations, memberships and sponsorship to sustain its exhibits and galleries. Anyone can donate online.