The Hartford Circus Fire: July 6, 1944

On the afternoon of July sixth, nineteen forty-four, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus was performing in Hartford. The tent held somewhere between six thousand and eight thousand people, families, most of them, with children. It was a Wednesday afternoon.

The Great Wallendas were in the middle of their high-wire act when, just outside the tent, near the men's toilet partition, a fire started. The tent had been waterproofed with a mixture of paraffin and gasoline. It burned fast.

Within minutes the canvas was fully involved. People ran for the exits, but several were blocked by animal runways and caging equipment. At least one hundred sixty-seven people died, many of them children.

More than seven hundred were injured. Four circus officials later pleaded no contest to charges of negligence and received sentences ranging from six months to several years, and were later pardoned. An investigation found that the fire extinguishers had been buried and inaccessible at the time of the fire, and the fire trucks were parked more than a quarter-mile away.

The cause was never officially determined. A man named Robert Dale Segee confessed under interrogation in nineteen fifty, but investigators doubted his account, and he later recanted. The fire remains officially unsolved.

What followed, in the weeks and months after July sixth, was a transformation in fire safety law across the United States. New regulations required fireproof tents at outdoor events, mandatory on-site firefighting personnel, and clear, unobstructed exits at public gatherings. The reforms reached far beyond Connecticut.

Hartford still holds the memory of that afternoon, the day the circus came to town and did not go well. A memorial now marks the site. The names of the dead are preserved.