#721: “Old Lyme, Connecticut has the world's only museum dedicated to nuts. The world's largest nutcracker, 8 feet long, hangs outside on a tree.”
Times have unfortunately changed.
From 1972 to 2002, Elizabeth Tashjian ran the Nut Museum. After she fell into a coma, the museum closed and the state seized her estate to pay her debts. A professor at Connecticut College convinced the town to donate the museum to them. Tashjian spent her remaining years helping the college's students sort through the museum items, which contained mostly art pieces and comparatively few nuts.
Tashjian sounded like a wonderful woman. She embraced nuts, because she liked the association with both the literal nut and the slang word meaning insane. Tashjian thought that society should accept nuts too and her museum tried to prove that.