By all accounts, the amateur museum that Donald C. Miller ran out of his home in the cornfields of central Indiana wasn’t exactly a secret. Newspaper reporters, Boy Scout troops and residents of the rural farming community of Waldron were all invited to drop in and look around in his basement, where glass cases covered most of the walls.
Tens of thousands of rare cultural artifacts were on display including pre-Columbian pottery, Ming Dynasty jade, an Egyptian sarcophagus and a dugout canoe that had traveled down the Amazon River. And the eccentric nonagenarian collector was part of the attraction.