Wayne County Historical Museum

Pioneer artefacts, early automobiles, and an unexpected Egyptian mummy in a Quaker-founded city

The Wayne County Historical Museum occupies a complex of buildings in the heart of Richmond and holds one of the better small-city historical collections in Indiana. The emphasis is on the county's Quaker founding and frontier era, with pioneer artefacts, tools, and furnishings from the early 19th century. There are also early automobiles manufactured locally — Richmond had a brief automotive industry in the early 1900s, producing the Westcott and other models.

The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is modest. The Egyptian mummy, donated in 1892, remains the collection's most discussed item — an improbable artefact in a museum devoted to Quaker settlement history, but one that has been here long enough to have become part of the place.

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Among the Wayne County Historical Museum's collection is a 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy, donated to the museum in 1892 by a local man who acquired it while travelling. It is one of those American museum curiosities that arrived through the 19th-century market for antiquities — entirely out of context, entirely compelling, and entirely real.

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