One of Disneyland Paris’ largest roller coasters carries a perhaps surprising message at the base of a massive blue and gold cannon, spelled in large letters: “Baltimore Gun Club.”

Star Wars Hyperspace Mountain, one of the French theme park’s most popular attractions, is filled with references to the club. It’s on the cannon that shoots out 24 screaming roller coaster riders at the start of the ride. And Baltimore Gun Club signage is scattered where people line up to board the 29-year-old roller coaster.

If you find yourself at the sprawling theme park about 20 miles from the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony, you may wonder what on earth this space-themed roller coaster has to do with Charm City.

The answer? A 19th-century French science fiction novel.

The ride, which opened in 1995 under a different name, draws its theme from the novel “From the Earth to the Moon,” by noted French sci-fi author Jules Verne. The 1865 book is about a society of weapons-obsessed Civil War veterans founded in Baltimore, dubbed the Baltimore Gun Club.

“During the Civil War in the United States, a highly influential club was founded in the city of Baltimore, in the middle of Maryland,” the book’s first sentence reads.

The club’s goal is to build a cannon that can launch three people to the moon.

Tim Delaney, one of Disney’s “imagineers,” designed the ride in the early 1990s. It was part of “Discoveryland,” a section of Disneyland Paris that was inspired by European visionaries like Verne and Leonardo Da Vinci to attract more European visitors to the financially struggling park, Delaney said.

Delaney, who read Verne’s novel and was trying to closely base the ride off what happens in the book, remembers his colleagues’ reactions when he first showed them the sketch of a cannon.

Its presence surprised — and confused — people.

“My boss goes ‘What is this Baltimore Gun Club? We don’t get this. What is this?’” Delaney said. “It’s kind of an interesting nuance to all this, but it’s just a small part of a big story.”

Annotations of the book by Walter James Miller, a prominent translator of Verne’s work, offered a theory for why Verne chose Baltimore to house the gun club.

“Even that innocent-looking place-name Baltimore is guaranteed to catch the eye. Such a strange place it must be to have earned two contradictory nicknames: ‘Monumental City’ and ‘Mobtown’!” Miller wrote in 1978.

Many of Verne’s stories took place in the United States because of his audience’s — and his own — fascination with America, according to Miller. Baltimore was particularly interesting to Verne because of its mix of “international character” and “frequent riots.” It was known for its “splendid civic planning” along with political violence during the Civil War, Miller wrote.

“If Verne’s story begins here, then his readers look for new understanding of cosmopolitan America, futuristic America, violent America,” Miller wrote.

The ride is the Paris theme park’s version of the iconic “Space Mountain” roller coasters that exist at most Disney parks. While it has gone through three iterations since it opened in Paris — each straying further from the original literary theme — the presence of the Baltimore Gun Club has been constant. Since 2017, the ride has held a Star War theme, featuring beaming laser lights and the soundtrack of the beloved franchise. But the ride’s exterior is the same, and the Baltimore Gun Club signage remains.

In the actual novel, Baltimore doesn’t take center stage. The gun club assembles for a meeting at Baltimore’s Union Square and its president, a man named Impey Barbicane, rallies them behind his new idea: to create a cannon that can launch a projectile to the moon. The group ultimately decides on “Tampa Town,” Florida, as the place where they’ll construct and launch the cannon, and the rest of the novel takes place there.

Barbicane has a rival, an armor designer from Philadelphia who bets that launching a projectile to the moon is impossible, perhaps foreshadowing the two cities’ rivalry over who makes the best cheesesteak.