The carousel house in Meridian's Highland Park shelters the only two-row stationary Dentzel menagerie left in the world. Gustav Dentzel's company of Philadelphia built it, and Meridian's city bought it in 1909 and has kept it in the same park ever since. Twenty-eight animals and two chariots ride a platform about 30 feet across: twenty horses, a lion, a tiger, two deer, two antelope and two giraffes, all carved by hand from poplar. Oil paintings crown the top. The house is a National Historic Landmark too, the last original carousel building made from a Dentzel blueprint.
The carousel belongs to a park laid out in the streetcar-pleasure-park fashion of the early 1900s. A rail line from downtown ran to the main entrance, and the grounds were planned around a promenade, a gazebo, a bandstand and a lagoon, on the old Meridian Fair and Livestock Exposition grounds, which passed to a trust in 1906. The carousel closed for restoration in 1983 and 1984, and the animals, chariots and paintings were then restored over the following decade by the North Carolina specialist Rosa Ragan. The park joined the National Register in 1979.
Near the carousel the park keeps memorials to Jimmie Rodgers and a 1917 Baldwin steam locomotive on a short stretch of track, the engine the Meridian and Bigbee Railroad gave the city in 1953 as a memorial to deceased railroaders. Rodgers's museum stood here until it moved. Carousel hours change with the season, so check before you drive over.
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