In Illinois and California

The McDonald’s #1 Store Museum in Des Plaines, Illinois

By Megan McKinney

When we searched for a photo of the late Ray Kroc—the mass culture genius who created the McDonald’s Hamburgers phenomenon—without asking, we also received his net worth: the happy sum of $600 million, which would be $1.8 billion in 2025 dollars.

Ray Kroc

The McDonald’s Museums story begins back in the 1950’s when Mr. Kroc, then a traveling salesman from suburban Chicago, happened upon a hamburger drive-in restaurant in San Bernardino, California.

The McDonald’s drive-in was owned by a pair of brothers.

They were Dick and Mac McDonald, who never seemed to be photographed when one or the other was not chomping on a burger. But the pair did give the restaurant a personality, thus Ray Kroc entered into a franchising agreement with them. The first McDonald’s in the franchise was Mr. Kroc’s own restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois, which became known as the McDonald’s #1 Store and is now the Des Plaines McDonald’s Museum, shown in the photograph at the top of this story.

However, if you ever find yourself in San Bernardino, Califorina, do look in on a competing McDonald’s Museum, labeled Historic Site of the Original McDonald’s and providing a spectrum of artifacts within.

In 1997, the Chicago Tribune published a statement that by then McDonald’s had grown to “around fifteen thousand locations in about seventy countries.”