Circus History – some local angles
Stevens Point Daily Journal Sept. 8, 1979
"This is a typical one-horse town, with no street cars, and the
worst kind of sandy streets." (Excerpt from the route book of
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show on its visit to Stevens Point on Sept.
4, 1896.)
Portage County has a small share in Wisconsin’s rich circus
heritage, according to Robert Parkinson of the Circus World
Museum, Baraboo.
Parkinson spoke Friday afternoon at the University Center during the
second annual meeting of the Wisconsin Folklore and Folklife Society.
One name, Ringling, naturally came up more often than others. But
names such as Mabie, Castello, Coup and Gollmar are also prominent in
circus lore, and they had Wisconsin connections too.
Well over 100 circuses have been based, wintered or organized in
Wisconsin, more than in any other state, said Parkinson.
Plover, he said, was the home of the Engford Family
Shows, a small motorized circus that operated in the 1920s and ‘30s.
The only Wisconsin-based circus still in existence is the Franzen
Brothers based near Nelsonville. Wayne Franzen, who once taught at
Stevens Point Area Senior High School, founded it in 1974.
"Though very small, it has gained a substantial reputation for
the tremendous quality of its performing animals," said Parkinson.
The circus as we know it, he said, originated in London in about 1769
and came to the United States in 1793. In 1847, the Mabie Brothers
Circus, based in New York, ventured to the Midwest and established
winter quarters in Delavan, starting the Wisconsin circus tradition.
Circuses traveled from town to town by wagon until 1869, when Dan
Castello, a Racine based entrepreneur, took his circus to the West Coast
via the Union Pacific in 1869.
Then he teamed up with a Delavan circus man, William Cameron Coup,
and together they formed the first true railroad circus in 1872. It was
Coup, said Parkinson, who devised the sophisticated techniques that
allowed circus to load and unload with remarkable speed.
Meanwhile, about the time the Mabie circus was settling in Wisconsin,
Europe was torn by revolution. To escape military service in Germany, a
harness maker named August Rungling came to the United States. He wound
up in Baraboo, changed the spelling to Ringling and fathered a circus
dynasty.
Circus titans such as Forepaugh, Barnum, Sells Brothers and Coup were
struggling for supremacy by the 1880’s, but the unlikely winner turned
out to be the Ringling show, founded by five of August’s sons in 1884.
Parkinson said the Ringling circus was excellent, but no better than
the others. The brothers succeeded, he said, "because they were the
first circus proprietors to convince the American public they had done
away with grift," meaning pickpockets, cardsharps and the like.
They went so far as to hire Pinkerton detectives to accompany their
circus and point out con artists to the local police.
By 1907 the Ringling brothers, who now numbered seven, had bought out
their principal rivals.
They continued to make Baraboo their winter home until 1918. With
hundreds of horses to feed, said Parkinson, it was cheaper for the
circus to buy coal to heat buildings in fodder-rich Wisconsin than to go
south and import hay.
Parkinson said the heyday of the circus ended about 1939 or 1940. In
that era, Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey played under a big top
that seated almost 12,000 people and covered nearly as much area as two
football fields. It had 1,400 employees.
A disastrous fire hit the big top in Hartford, Conn., in 1944, and
since 1956 the Ringling circus has only played indoors.
"I’m delighted that I was able to experience the circus
heyday, and grieved that most were not," Parkinson told his
audience. |
