MISQUAH — The fifth grade at Oakview Elementary presented its annual wax museum Thursday — the living-history exhibition in which students pose as historical figures and recite their accomplishments when a visitor presses a paper “button” — and which this year featured, by entirely independent and uncoordinated choice, three Paul Bunyans.

The wax museum is the culmination of the fifth-grade year, the end of a research unit in which each student selects a notable figure, writes a report, and then stands very still in a costume until activated. This year’s figures ranged from Amelia Earhart to Abraham Lincoln to a startlingly committed Babe Ruth, but the dominant historical force, by a margin of three, was the legendary north-woods lumberjack, selected — the teachers learned too late to intervene — by three separate students who had not consulted one another and were each privately certain the idea was theirs alone.

“We don’t assign the figures,” explained fifth-grade teacher Lois Hagen, surveying a gymnasium containing three of the same giant. “The children choose. And it turns out that if you let a fifth grader in this part of Minnesota choose a hero, a certain number of them are going to choose the enormous man with the blue ox, and there is no rule against it — though I may be drafting one over the summer.” The three Bunyans, stationed at intervals around the room, recited overlapping and not entirely consistent accounts of the same tall tale, an effect several parents pronounced “more educational than intended.”

Judges — drawn from the staff and one bewildered school-board member — praised the exhibition’s ambition and offered the fifth grade a single note for next year: that the axes, several of which had been rendered in actual wood, would be better made of cardboard. The wax museum closed, as it does each year, with the figures finally permitted to move, at which point, Mrs. Hagen reported, “all three Paul Bunyans went straight for the snack table, which is the most historically accurate thing any of them did all afternoon.”