Allen County Historical Society and Museum in Lima, Ohio

All the United States Ohio Lima Allen County Historical Society and Museum James E. Grosjean's Noah's Ark "spectacular display" is a primitive version of animatronics built in 1901 -- showing the biblical story in a moving diorama of animals and choreographed lights. Grosjean’s Noah’s Ark Diorama wummewenders / Atlas Obscura User Unusual diorama in the Grosjean room of curiosities. wummewenders / Atlas Obscura User A cabinet of Grosjean’s prolific taxidermy. wummewenders / Atlas Obscura User Grosjean’s Noah’s Ark Diorama wummewenders / Atlas Obscura User Unusual diorama in the Grosjean room of curiosities. wummewenders / Atlas Obscura User A cabinet of Grosjean’s prolific taxidermy. wummewenders / Atlas Obscura User 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.