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Trains of the Circus 1872-1956 by Fred Dahlinger Jr Circus World Museum Photo Bk
Trains of the Circus 1872-1956 by Fred Dahlinger, Jr Circus World Museum presents
Soft Cover
126 pages
Copyright 2000
Mostly black & white photos
INTRODUCTION
A circus was presented before an American audience for the first time on April 4, 1793. It consisted of a program of horsemanship, rope walking, clowning, and ground acrobatics organized by John Bill Ricketts and presented within a ring. His troupe, and those that followed in the next three decades, erected temporary wood and canvas amphitheaters in major cities, where they played extended engagements. A portable canvas tent, or "pavilion," to house the performance, first used in 1825 by J. Purdy Brown, enabled a circus to relocate to a new community on a daily basis. Moving their baggage and personnel across land by horse, wagon and carriage, overland circuses erected their canvas "tops" in nearly every community encountered by their perambulating caravans. Coastal sailing vessels moved troupes in 1793 and other showmen visited inland river communities by steamboat commencing in 1822, but it was the nationwide network of railroads that eventually proved most adept in taking the circus to entertainment-seeking American audiences.
Show personnel, as a group, traveled by system passenger train in 1838. Soon after there was adequate trackage to do so, some circuses infrequently loaded their equipment onto leased system cars and made long-distance "jumps." In the 1850s and 1860s, the phrase `railroad circus" was used in a derogatory way. It defined a limited circus that consisted of only a big top show and a free attraction in the form of a limited parade or balloon ascension. It was "gillied" by hand labor and horse-drawn dray wagons from leased railroad cars to the appointed show grounds.
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