Levi Fisher Ames was born in 1840 to a Pennsylvania farming family with Swiss roots. Little is known about his early life other than that during his youth his family moved to Green County, Wisconsin. In 1862 Ames enlisted in the Union Army and, despite suffering an injury, reenlisted and served until the war’s end in 1865.

He purchased land in Monroe, Wisconsin, where he lived with his wife, Lucinda, and their six children. Ames’s primary income came from light carpentry jobs, specifically the crafting and repairing of violins. He also created over six hundred carvings of animals, real and mythic, that he displayed in double-hinged shadow boxes he made himself. Starting in the 1880s, he took these creations around the state in custom-made trunks as a tent show he called the L. F. Ames Museum of Art. Ames and various family members entertained onlookers for decades with carving demonstrations, violin and banjo playing, and storytelling.

Ames died in 1923, with the hope that his menagerie would remain intact. The wooden beasts and bugs were passed down through his family (with a brief stay at a pawnshop during the Great Depression) until 161 shadow boxes and forty other pieces were given to Kohler Foundation, Inc., in 2001. After the works were conserved, the foundation gifted the collection to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.