Michigan County to Build $2 Million Museum to Promote Pseudohistorical Claim

​In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a controversy is brewing over the expansion of a local museum because of its connection to bizarre fringe theories. Last week tiny Baraga County, with a population of just 8,000 people, broke ground on a massive expansion of their local historical museum. The $2 million expansion would quadruple the size of the 2,200-square-foot museum is ostensibly in service of presenting the history of the local Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, as the L’Anse Indian Reservation of the Ojibwa is located within the county.

However, the 6,400-square-foot expansion is funded with a donation from Jay Wakefield, 82, and the Ancient Artifact Preservation Society, who stipulated that the museum must present the fringe theory that millions of pounds of copper is “missing” from Michigan and had been removed by Phoenicians in pre-Columbian times. (Readers with a long memory will remember that America Unearthed did an episode about this fictitious allegation back in 2013.)

​The expanded copper-themed section of the museum, which will feature dubious “artifacts” alongside genuine ones, will be named for Fred Rydholm, a former middle school teacher who wrote several books promoting fraudulent archaeological claims, including the Burrows Cave hoax and the “missing” Phoenician copper of Michigan. Rydholm wrote in a 1993 Ancient American article, reprinted in his book Michigan Copper: The Untold Story (2006), that Michigan had originally been inhabited by “the Caucasian race” and “another group of inferior culture, resembling the Indians of today” who fought each other until the extinction of the white race. (This, of course, is an early nineteenth century pseudohistorical fantasy.) But money talks, so Baraga is getting a museum of fake history named for a man with Victorian ideas about prehistoric race wars.