Avelanche: I'm thinking if it was not Aunt Mollie's Store, it probably was the Wash Gibbs Museum. Chick Allen ran the last of the old time tourist traps on Highway 76. I would see him daily out on the edge of the road waving at cars as they drove by. Always in overalls and a straw hat. Always visiting and telling stories to the tourists. Always visiting with old friends who stopped by. He had all that hillbilly stuff for sale, the hats, corncob pipes, and so on.
Another place that was in operation for the first few years I lived in Branson was Jesse James Confusion Hill and Museum. It was located exactly on the spot that the Veterans Museum is today, adjacent to the Methodist Church property. It also was a very busy tourist trap in the early days, say the 1950s through the mid to late 1970s. It featured a restaurant, motel (with a stallion made of fiberglass that moved back and forth, something next to the pool to grab your attention as you drove by) the museum, consisting of a bunch of odd and end junk and old time household stuff, a nice, small collection of old Model T type cars, and then, confusion hill. Confusion Hill was a maze of stairways and chain link fences that went up about three or four stories and provided a nice scenic outlook towards Lake Taneycomo and School of the Ozarks. By the time I moved to Branson in mid 1978, the confusion hill was closed because it fell into disrepair and was unsafe. I did use my SDC pass exchange program benefit to tour the old museum in the winter of 1980 with my friends Carol Meyers (a Ruby Dugan) and Terry Sanders, who had just finished his first season at SDC that year working with me at the diving bell. Carol and Terry had come over to my parents house where I still lived at the time, and they took a look at all my SDC collectables that I kept in a couple of files in a drawer...that collection has expanded to a couple of drawers of paper items that I keep in a file cabinet in my home office today.
Also along Highway 76 and in operation until about the last year was Dickens Gift Shop, located just east of the entrance to Mutton Hollow.
There was a Little Bo Peep Gift Shop, located in the vicinity of the Victorian Shop across Highway 76 from Peppercorn's Restaurant.
Those two gift shops were from the old days of Branson, as well. Last time I cruised through Branson I thought that Dickens Gift Shop was closed and was for sale. Little Bo Peep was demolished in the 1980s or 1990s and the property redeveloped.
