In Challenging Chicago, Perry R. Duis explains that J. H. Wood’s “museum,” which opened in 1862 on the north side of Randolph Street east of Clark Street, was the Chicago equivalent to P. T. Barnum's New York museum, which was itself destroyed by fire six years before Chicago’s great conflagration. Wood boasted that he owned 150,000 items of many different kinds. Journalist James W. Sheahan conceded that credit was due to Wood for his "sagacity in discovering that Chicago was the only city outside of New York where people had the cultivation and liberality to encourage and maintain a Museum of such large proportions involving such heavy expenditures.” The building also contained a theater, on whose stage appeared a variety of musical and dramatic productions.
The holdings of the museum resembled the grab-bag of specimens and oddities that dated back to the private wunderkammer of early modern Europe, with a touch of the bogus. Duis points out that for twenty-five cents visitors could view “more than sixty cases of birds, reptiles, insects, and objects from around the world, all arranged somewhat haphazardly.” In addition there was a scale model of the Parthenon, ship models, Daniel Boone’s rifle, and mummies that had supposedly belonged to Mormon prophet Joseph Smith. “The most spectacular attraction,” Duis writes, “was the ‘Great Zeuglodon,’ a ninety-six foot-long skeleton of a prehistoric whale. For those who doubted its authenticity, Wood employed the marketing technique widely used by the patent medicine industry and included testimonials from scientists in his catalog.” Note the poster, hovering over Randolph Street, advertising the “LARGEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD WEIGHING NEAR 900 [pounds].”
