- Now, if you've been following us here on "Destination Michigan," you know very well that the state has museums in nearly every town and city covering a variety of topics.

But in the city of Lansing, in the shadow of the capital, there's a museum that's taking on the daunting task of covering the entire history of Michigan from 14,000 BC up until today.

We now head to the Michigan History Center in Lansing.

(upbeat music) - It tells the history of Michigan, kind of in a walking timeline.

So you start, it's right at the end of the ice age and it goes all the way through the, almost the end of the 20th century.

- [Matthew] With four floors of exhibits at the Michigan History Museum, there is a lot to take in.

The museum is located inside the Michigan History Center, which also holds the state's archives.

Each year, approximately 45,000 students from across the state come through its doors.

And what they find inside is truly an eye-opening experience.

- When you go up to the elevator and the doors open on the second floor, you're seeing what you're seeing behind me.

These kind of amazing built environments with super tall trees and a large map.

So we designed the museum to, kind of, tell the history of Michigan's peoples, their stories, the big events in the State's history, but you can walk through them in a very experiential way.

- [Matthew] Walking through the exhibits means you're walking through time.

Upon entering the museum you're introduced to the stories of Michigan's first people.

- In 2016 we redesigned how we talk about Michigan's first peoples and indigenous tribes by working with several of Michigan's 12 federally recognized tribes to tell their story in their words, in their ways.

So we ended up creating a gigantic wall mural that shows the lifeways pre-European contact of the very vibrant Anishnabeg civilizations that were in this state.

And it has enabled us to tell a much more accurate, much more complete story of this time period.

- [Matthew] As you pass the vibrant mural of Michigan's first people, you come upon one of the most immersive yet intimidating exhibits you'll find at the museum.

- Probably our most popular exhibits, for kids and adults alike, is we have, kind of, a recreated copper mine where you, kind of, come around a corner and you're looking into a dark mine.

And it's either people, they're terrified by it or they absolutely love it.

So you can kind of go in and if you walk to the back, you see a rope going up and if you look up, it's like you're looking up a mine shaft, like, you know, a hundred feet.

- [Matthew] Make it through the mine shaft and your next steps bring you into Michigan's modern times, relatively speaking.

- When you get off the elevator on the third floor, that starts 20th century Michigan.

So you walk a little bit through the assembly line on one side to talk about the automation and the mechanization and industrialization of Michigan.

On the other side, we talk about what was going on in farming and in the rural parts of the state.

When you walk through that and suddenly you're in a street in Detroit in the 1920s.

And you can look ahead and see a window from J.L Hudson's store in downtown Detroit.

There's a great, kind of, recreated movie palace where you can go in and watch some segments of some old fashioned movies from the 1920s.

There's even a car dealership in there with an actual car in the middle of it.

It's just a lot of fun.

You really feel like you're walking down a street.

- [Matthew] From copper mining to the auto industry, you learn about some of the biggest moments in Michigan history.

But honestly, some of my favorite spots in the museum are these recreations of homes that Michiganders have lived in through the generations.

- The first one is on our second floor mezzanine level, next to our one room schoolhouse.

Kind of gives you an idea of what a typical family home in Michigan would've looked like about middle of the 19th century.

So you can go and see all of the dining rooms, and all of the knickknacks and all of the things.

We have another one that talks about the mid 1950s, which is a crowd favorite because all the appliances in the kitchen are bright pink, as they were.

(laughs) But the nice thing about is you can, kind of, see the change in how people lived and what were the stuff they have in their homes over time.

- [Matthew] Now Tobi tells us that one of the coolest pieces of history in the museum is actually so small that many visitors walk right by it.

- Upstairs on our third floor, right after the 1950s, you kind of go into a recreated auto show, but next to it there's a case that looks like a missile and inside there's a tiny little Michigan flag that looks a little frayed and then a little dot, maybe about an inch round, that's got two tiny rocks in it.

And what they are is, the very first mission to the moon, every state sent a flag on the mission up to the moon, and the astronauts collected moon rocks and every state, when they came back, got their flag back and some moon rocks.

I said, you could miss it if you're not paying attention, but you could see some real moon rocks and a flag from Michigan that was flown on the moon in our exhibits.