Allen County Historical Society and Museum

If the entirety of this museum wasn’t so peculiar already, the James E. Grosjean Room at the Allen County Historical Museum would be a place of magic surrealism; a tactile portal to the past in the midst of the proverbial Rust Belt town built quickly on oil. Lima once had a bustling trolley system, the prominent Faurot Opera House, industry, culture and promise. But now it’s easy to see the decline. In that, this room stands as a gem.

The museum here is special because it conjures that nostalgia in more ways than one. It’s got the requisite quilts, trains, natural history and native artifacts that you can find in most museums. The collections here, though, represent an archived dream state. There is no other place like it.

In the Grosjean Room, the lights go out. The docent flips a switch and then a schmaltzy soundtrack and filmstrip narration begins. Beams of light glow through a stained-glass background and a dove flies across the scene. Eventually giraffes join the procession of animals into Noah’s Ark. As a mechanical display of motion and light, it predates Disney’s animatronics by decades, yet has the Midwestern hokum of pure folk art. You’ve got to see it live.

By all accounts, Grosjean was a polymath, responsible for the impressive reliquary that is this Lima museum. He was an undertaker, a shoe salesman, an inventor, a historian and full time innovator. Though his first “spectacular display” (a story of Cock Robin) was destroyed while on loan during the 1913 Dayton Flood, Noah’s Ark, built in 1901, has a storied history.

Before becoming a premier window attraction at Marshall Fields in Chicago, Macy’s in New York and his own downtown Lima shoe store, Grosjean’s ark was rejected by the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Always the showman, he then set up his own (not so successful) exhibit in nearby Niagara Falls. As the president of the Allen County Historical Society from 1915 until his death in 1938, Grosjean made sure his creations—and other artifacts that reflected the community—stayed in the permanent collection.