Ringlingville: Where the Greatest Show on Earth Was Born
Near Baraboo, Wisconsin
On the nineteenth of May, in eighteen eighty-four, five brothers from Baraboo raised a canvas tent on the edge of their little Wisconsin town and gave their very first show. Al, Alf T., Otto, Charles, and John Ringling called it the Great Double Shows, Circus and Caravan.
The main tent measured only forty-five feet by ninety feet. There was no band wagon and no menagerie, just the ambition of five sons of a harness maker who had grown up along the rivers of the upper Midwest, dazzled by traveling performers. Their father was a German immigrant harness maker named August, and the boys had made a pact as children to build a show of their own.
For six seasons they crawled from town to town behind horse-drawn wagons, sleeping rough and passing the hat, learning the hard trade of the road. Then they put the whole show on railroad cars, and everything changed. Rail let them leap from one city to the next overnight, carrying more tents, more animals, and grander acts than a wagon show ever could.
Baraboo became the winter home of the circus, a sprawling compound the locals nicknamed Ringlingville. Here, along the Baraboo River, from eighteen eighty-four until nineteen eighteen, the animals were stabled, the gilded wagons repaired, the acrobats and clowns rehearsed through the cold months. Elephants walked the streets of this quiet county-seat town.
In nineteen oh seven the Ringlings bought their greatest rival, the Barnum and Bailey Circus, which billed itself as the Greatest Show on Earth. For years they ran the two giants separately, then merged them in nineteen nineteen into the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Combined Shows. From a forty-five foot tent in a farm town rose the most famous circus in American history, an empire of spectacle that filled arenas for generations.
That is why Baraboo still proudly calls itself the Circus City, and why the old brick winter-quarters buildings along the river are treasured landmarks today. Not bad for five brothers who began with borrowed nerve and a patch of trampled grass. Stand here and you are standing where American entertainment was reinvented, one Wisconsin winter at a time.
