In 1866, Samuel Coovert became the only person ever executed in Warren County after killing four people with an axe on Christmas Night two years earlier.

The shackles that Coovert wore as he was led to his final fate were preserved as were many other morbid artifacts over the course of Warren County’s history.

The Warren County Historical Society has opened “Gruesome But Truesome” a new exhibit featuring some of the most morbid and bizarre pieces of Warren County history.

“People have always had an uneasy fascination with death and that fascination has taken many forms,” said Lynley Dunahm, Archivist and Assistant Curator at the Warren County History Museum and the organizer of the Gruesome but Truesome exhibit.

The museum had occasionally presented lectures of some of their more gruesome artifacts that had been met with acclaim, Dunahm said, so she decided to put together a more permanent exhibit of the strange pieces of history that have been donated to the museum over the years.

“Since I started really looking through the archives at the pieces, I became amazed at what I found,” Dunahm said. “It seemed like strange items were literally falling out of storage to be part of the exhibit.”

Among the macabre pieces of history on display is a Napoleon death mask, brought back as a souvenir from a trip to France; ‘hair art’ — pieces of art work that were made out of deceased individuals hair as a keepsake; Governor Thomas Corwin’s invitation to Abraham Lincoln’s funeral (Corwin was a pallbearer at Lincoln’s funeral); a piece of the USS Maine, the battleship whose destruction marked the beginning of the Spanish American War; and a salesman’s miniature model coffin.

One of Dunahm’s favorite pieces is the stern and frightening portrait of Absolom “Absolute” Death.

“For a long time, I saw his picture and was convinced he had to be notorious for some reason,” Dunahm said. “He just looks so menacing.”

Death, it turned out, was an upstanding citizen from Franklin whose nickname came from not from some grisly reputation but his workaholic tendencies, Dunahm said.

The exhibit also features pieces of furniture from Oswalt Funeral Home.

“Oswalt Funeral Home actually started as a furniture store and slowly shifted from making cabinets to coffins,” Dunahm said.

“The Victorians had a very peculiar sense of death and the decorum surrounding it,” Dunahm said. “They were very into death masks and taking pictures of the deceased. For many people, these were the only ways they had to remember lost loved ones.”

The “Gruesome but Truesome” display is scheduled to run indefinitely at the Warren County Historical Society Museum, 105 S. Broadway, Lebanon. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays.