Diehm Museum of Natural History

There are probably still plenty of people in Fort Wayne who haven’t heard of the museum. The building is obscured by trees lining Sherman so even if you noticed the building it was nearly impossible to tell what it was.
Just in case you don’t know, it was a museum of mounted animals, more than 400 examples, the sort of displays one might find at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. No, they didn’t have any dinosaur skeletons or stuffed man-​eating lions, but the displays were quality work.
Unfortunately, in the summer, visitors tended to go to the zoo, where they could see live animals, and in the winter, when the zoo was closed, so was the Diehm Museum, an arrangement that never made much sense to me and explained why only a few hundred people visited the museum each year.
Now the building is in need of expensive maintenance, including a new roof.
So instead of dropping a bundle of money on the building, at 2 p.m. next Tuesday the displays, which include a 13-​foot polar bear, a grizzly bear, a full-​bodied lion, bald eagles and a bunch of smaller animals and fish, go up for sale
Someday people will probably talk about the museum the city once had, and all its displays, just like the ones you find in major museums in large cities.
The story will end like so many others.
«They tore it down,» we’ll recall.
*Note* you know that «BRAND NEW» expensive downtown public user library that they just had to build? The one with extensive, genealogical library that, «just had to build»?
They are now putting all the records on the internet. So that way people can look up all the combined records. Along with the Abraham Lincoln archives. On the internet.
Why drive to the city anyway?
**UPDATE** I just talked to one of the museum/​zoo employees. When I asked him why they would not donate any of the exhibits to the main library. He told me that of the money that will be raised from this auction.