The Allen County
Historical Museum
By ROBERT C. WHEELER*
An Allen County dream is about to become
a reality. Late in
1955 the new Allen County Historical
Museum will open to the
public, an event long awaited in and
around Lima. Few cities in the
country can boast such facilities for
preserving and interpreting their
past.
The new museum will have, in addition to
ample exhibit space, an
auditorium seating 225, a local history
library, and a thirty-car park-
ing area. According to James A.
MacDonell, president of the Allen
County Historical Society, the museum
will operate with a staff
of four--a curator, Mrs. Harry B.
Longsworth, an assistant cur-
ator, a guard, and a janitor.
As an educational feature, near the
museum, on a short piece
of narrow-gauge track, will rest an
eighteen-ton, Lima made, Shay
locomotive. Gift of the National Lima
and Stone Company and
restored by the Baldwin-Lima-Hamilton
Company, the Shay will
represent Lima's oldest continuous
industry. It was the Shay locomo-
tive which, in the 1880's,
revolutionized the lumbering industry. The
iron work-horse of the northern forests,
operating on a wooden
track, increased many fold the output of
logs. This same engine
also proved to be a boon to the mining
and quarrying industries.
Allen County's new museum actually began
in the minds of its
citizens back in 1938, when members of
the historical society dis-
cussed the need for a new historical
museum. Through the years
a collection of museum objects had been
housed on the upper
floor of Lima's Memorial Hall. The
historical society was grateful
* Robert C. Wheeler is field
representative of the Ohio Historical Society.
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