Curiosities Too Numerous to Mention: Early Regionalism and Cincinnati's Western Museum

Abstract

IN THE LATE 1830S, TRAVELERS FAMILIAR WITH NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN museums found little in the display rooms of Cincinnati's Western Museum to differentiate it from many other similar museums. Posted among its glass cases of insects, rocks, bones, coins, and Indian artifacts stood life-size wax figures of Washington, Jackson, Charlotte Corday, and Napoleon Bonaparte; oil paintings darkened by lamp soot hung near the ceiling. Dotted about the displays were curiosities of doubtful provenance: the head of an Egyptian mummy, a sepulchral lamp from Pompeii, and such shams as a mermaid constructed by stitching the head and hands of a monkey to the body of a fish. Ranged along one wall were rows of glass jars holding hideously deformed animals, some suspiciously waxy, suspended in cloudy liquids. In the Museum's attic, however, was the eccentric attraction that had brought the Western Museum popular fame-The Infernal Regions, a mechanized and electrified version of Dante's Hell that entertained a paying audience every night but Sunday with a shrieking assemblage of imps, demons, and animal and human grotesques alternately freezing and burning. The show was enclosed by an iron rail electrified by means of a hand generator, and it delivered smart shocks to visitors attempting to touch the crawling and writhing figures within. Knowledgeable travelers and observers tended to find the Museum's displays, mean as they are, also miserably deficient in order and arrangement, and The Infernal Regions above to be a piece of charlatanism . . ., gross and impious humbug.' In fact, by the 1830s little but its appellation remained to suggest that the Western Museum's original intent had differed widely from the dusty incoherence travelers saw. The Museum's founders had, two decades earlier, created a regional museum to serve as both a compendium and an illumination of