The Lima Army Tank Plant, officially called the Joint Systems Manufacturing Center, built in 1941, is the sole producer of the M1 Abrams.

In the years after the American Revolution, the Shawnee were the most prominent residents of west central Ohio, growing in numbers and permanency after the 1794 Treaty of Greenville.

By 1817, the United States had created the Hog Creek Reservation for the local Shawnee, covering portions of what would become Allen and Auglaize counties, and including part of present-day Lima.

[7] The creation of the Shawnee reservation freed other lands in the area for settlement, and in February 1820, the Ohio legislature formally established Allen County.

In 1831, the Shawnee were forced to surrender all their land in the area to the United States and relocated to Kansas, opening all of Allen County to settlement.

[8] The name was reputedly chosen in a nod to the Peruvian capital which, during the 1800s, was a major source of quinine, an anti-malaria drug for which there had been a demand in the region, an area known as the Great Black Swamp.

Also in 1854, a cholera outbreak in Delphos (a town in Allen County northwest of Lima) spread throughout west central Ohio.

Stimulated by the economic boom in nearby Findlay, in 1885 Lima businessman Benjamin C. Faurot drilled for natural gas at his paper mill.

Benjamin Faurot's Opera House opened in 1882, a nationally renowned structure so impressive that New Yorkers used it as a model for their theaters.

In the early 20th century, Benjamin A. Gramm and his close friend Max Bernstein formed the Gramm-Bernstein Company, which became a pioneer in the motor truck industry.

During World War I, Gramm created the "Liberty truck", which was welcomed upon its arrival in Washington, D.C., by President Woodrow Wilson.

In 1933, gangster John Dillinger was in the Allen County Jail, arrested for robbing the Citizens National Bank in nearby Bluffton.

In May 1941, based in the steel foundry, construction began on the Lima Army Tank Plant to manufacture centrifugally cast gun tubes.

At its peak during the war, the Lima Tank Depot (now the Joint Systems Manufacturing Center, operated by General Dynamics), employed over 5,000 people.

Civil rights issues had rocked Lima in the 1950s, perhaps most prominently in the efforts to desegregate the city's only public swimming pool in Schoonover Park.

In 1885, Benjamin C. Faurot of Lima was one of hundreds of businessmen who visited Findlay to see the seemingly unlimited supply of natural gas burning day and night.

Unlike Pennsylvania's oil, northwest Ohio's "sour crude" was high in sulfur content, smelling like rotten eggs, and customers shunned it.

Additional crude glutted the market, and trying to slow production, Standard Oil lowered its price to fifteen cents a barrel.

Lima's Solar Refinery General Manager John Van Dyke and Herman Frasch, Standard's chemist, solved the distillation problem for sour crude by devising a method for removing the sulfur.

Freight still moves over most of the historic rail routes in and out of the city, but the last passenger train to stop in Lima was the Broadway Limited, then operated by Amtrak, on November 11, 1990.

The Chicago, Fort Wayne, and Eastern and the Indiana and Ohio railroad are owned by Genesee & Wyoming and are in the north and east parts of town.

In January 1953, a committee composed of John LaRotonda, Ben Schultz, Dom Trovarelli and Fred Mills organized the Lima Symphony Orchestra.

This committee selected Lawrence Burkhalter as the Symphony's first conductor and the LSO made its debut performance on May 23, 1954, in the Central High School auditorium.

Among the city's most distinctive residential neighborhoods, the "Golden Block" on the west side, was almost entirely demolished in the 1960s; only the MacDonell House, part of the Allen County Museum, and the YWCA survived.

According to Time magazine Moyer's campaign slogan in 1973 was "Let's get together and make Lima better — without any new taxes" and his "strategy is to merge public funds with private effort".

Upon Berger's retirement in November 2021, his chief of staff, Sharetta Smith, was sworn in as mayor after winning her election earlier in the month.

The Roman Catholic Church Sisters of Mercy opened St. Rita's in December 1918, in the midst of a national (and global) influenza epidemic.

In a landmark ruling, US District Judge Nicholas J. Walinski spelled out detailed requirements for assuring each patient's rights to "dignity, privacy and human care".

Musical comedy-drama television series Glee is set in the fictional William McKinley High School in Lima, although the show was filmed in Los Angeles.

[43] The fictional killer of Buckwheat in 1983 episodes of Saturday Night Live, John David Stutts, was reported to be from Lima, Ohio.