Ontonagon Historical Museum

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While travelling around Ontonagon, my wife and I stopped at this museum. Of course, there were rocks for my wife to look at, LOL!

It was interesting to see the vintage marbles. It reminded me of the time I made a website that sold vintage marbles and postcards. They had a log cabin inside the museum along with its furniture inside it.

I don’t even remember Apple having a laptop this old. In the future, I expect to see more and more technology showing up in Museums. It is slightly disturbing when I start to see toys I played with in my youth on display in museums now. I guess I’m not getting any younger.

There was an iron lung on display in the museum. I recently just read about the last person in an iron lung dying. Can you imagine staying in something like this for the rest of your life? Amy shared a story with me of someone she knew who was in one.

Martha Ann Lillard was the last known American polio survivor to depend on an iron lung, passing away on June 26, 2026, at age 78. She followed Paul Alexander, famously known as “the man in the iron lung,” who died in March 2024 at age 78.

I bed those large chunks of copper are worth some money!

They had a lighthouse light and a device where you can turn a knob to demonstrate how a lighthouse uses a stationary lamp surrounded by a special glass structure called a Fresnel Lens that bends (refracts) and bounces (reflects) escaping light rays into a single, highly concentrated horizontal beam that sweeps across the sea. If you look at the video closely, you can see the red light to the left always goes in the same direction.