More Circus images will be forthcoming...
"The Greatest Showman" is a film you will enjoy! Based on the life of P. T. Barnum...
HUGH JACKMAN BECOMES P. T. BARNUM IN THIS SUPERB FILM!
Who was P. T. Barnum?
P. T. Barnum & General Tom Thumb
P. T. Barnum was born on July 5, 1810, in Bethel, Connecticut, P.T. Barnum became a successful promoter after moving to New York City. From 1841 to 1868, he ran the Barnum American Museum, which featured the "Feejee Mermaid," "General Tom Thumb" and other oddities. In 1871, he launched the traveling spectacle that would eventually become the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. After an illustrious career, Barnum died in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on April 7, 1891.
Budding Promoter
P.T. Barnum was born Phineas Taylor Barnum on July 5, 1810, in Bethel, Connecticut. A natural salesman, he was peddling snacks and cherry rum to soldiers by age 12. Barnum moved to New York City as a young man and tried his hand at a variety of businesses, including newspaper publishing and running a boarding house.
In 1835, Barnum's knack for promotion surfaced when he paid $1,000 for an elderly slave named Joice Heth. Claiming she was 161 years old and a former nurse for George Washington, Barnum exhibited her throughout the northeast region, raking in an estimated $1,500 per week.
Barnum's American Museum
P.T. Barnum bought Scudder's American Museum in lower Manhattan in 1841 and reopened it as Barnum's American Museum. There he displayed the "Feejee Mermaid" and other oddities of dubious authenticity among what eventually expanded to a collection of 850,000 exhibits.
In 1842, Barnum met 4-year-old Charles Sherwood Stratton, who stood 25 inches tall and weighed 15 pounds. Sensing another potential windfall, Barnum trained the boy to sing and dance and revealed him to the public as "General Tom Thumb." The massive popularity of the exhibit led to a traveling tour of Europe, which included an audience with British monarch Queen Victoria.
In July 1865, Barnum's American Museum burned to the ground in a massive fire. The promoter soon opened another museum at a nearby location, but this one also was demolished by a fire, in March 1868.
'The Greatest Show on Earth'
After retiring from the museum business, Barnum teamed with circus owners Dan Castello and William C. Coup to launch P.T. Barnum's Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Hippodrome in 1871. Referring to the traveling spectacle as "The Greatest Show on Earth," Barnum took full ownership of the successful venture by 1875.
In 1881, Barnum joined forces with fellow circus managers James A. Bailey and James L. Hutchinson. The following year they introduced "Jumbo," an enormous 11 1/2-foot, 6 1/2-ton elephant from the Royal Zoological Society in London. As with many of Barnum's previous exhibits, Jumbo was a hit with audiences, until his death in 1885.
In 1887, an aging Barnum agreed to cede everyday control of the circus, which was rebranded as the Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth.
Jenny Lind Tour
Although he became famous for championing the weird and wacky, one of Barnum's most successful ventures came with the promotion of Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind in the early 1850s. After hearing about her sold-out concerts in Europe, Barnum made the "Swedish Nightingale" an offer of $1,000 per performance for 150 shows in the United States and Canada, a tour which earned him a huge profit of more than $500,000. A very considerable sum at that point in time!
Bridgeport Booster
In addition to his show-business career, Barnum sought to transform his adopted hometown of Bridgeport, Connecticut, into a thriving metropolis. He went bankrupt after attempting to lure the doomed Jerome Clock Company to Bridgeport in the 1850s, but repaired his financial standing through public-speaking engagements and additional touring with General Tom Thumb.
Barnum went on to serve multiple terms in the Connecticut Legislature and was elected mayor of Bridgeport in 1875. He helped found the Bridgeport Hospital soon afterward, and was named its first president.
Death and Legacy
Confined to his Bridgeport home after suffering a stroke in 1890, Barnum died on April 7, 1891. A businessman to the end, he allegedly asked about the previous night's gate receipts at the circus with his final words.
The Barnum & Bailey show was bought by the rival Ringling brothers in 1907, and in 1919 the two were incorporated into the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows.
Thanks in part to the enduring success of his circus, Barnum is celebrated as a brilliant promoter and a man who transformed the nature of commercial entertainment in the 19th century. He is also remembered for his philanthropic contributions and investments in the city of Bridgeport, where exhibits of his life and the curiosities he brought to the public are featured at the Barnum Museum.
In 2000, an online version of Barnum's bygone American Museum reopened, as the Lost Museum. In May 2017, the long-running extravaganza he founded, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus, delivered its final performance. Later that year, Barnum's story made it to the big screen in "The Greatest Showman," with Hugh Jackman in the starring role.
Article Title: P.T. Barnum Biography.com Author Website Name The Biography.com website
Who Were the Ringling Brothers?
Charles and John Ringling along with their brothers Albert and Otto, founded the Ringling Bros. Circus in 1884, in Baraboo, Wisconsin. By the 1930s, the Ringling Bros. were among the most famous American entrepreneurs, and were known throughout the world.
Ringling's original surname Runegling family of American circus proprietors who created the Ringling Brothers circus empire in the late 19th century.
The members active in founding and running the family’s circus enterprises were all brothers: Albert C. (1852–1916), Otto (1858–1911), Alfred T. (1861–1919), Charles (1863–1926), John (1866–1936), and occasionally August G. (1854–1907) and Henry (1869–1918) Ringling.
The sons of August Rüngeling, a German-born harness maker, Charles, Albert, Otto, Alfred, and John in 1882 formed a song-and-dance troupe, the Classic and Comic Concert Co., and went on the road with it for two seasons. They began adding circus acts to their show, and they organized their first small circus, which opened on May 19, 1884, in their hometown of Baraboo, Wisconsin; from there they toured the U.S. Midwest. Their progress was slow until they acquired their first elephant in 1888, after which the circus expanded rapidly. Charles was the guiding managerial force behind the circus for many years.
In 1890 the Ringling Brothers first began loading their circus wagons on railway cars, enabling them to make a much longer tour. By 1900 the Ringling Brothers were actively competing with the Barnum & Bailey Circus, and they subsequently started buying up other circuses. They acquired the Forepaugh-Sells Circus in 1906, and, after James A. Bailey's death in 1906, they bought the Barnum & Bailey Circus in 1907, thus becoming the leading circus in the country.
After Charles’s death in 1926, John ran the empire alone for 10 years. In 1929 he bought the American Circus Corporation, thus bringing a total of 11 major circuses under Ringling control. By this time the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus had a main-tent seating capacity of 10,000. John died in 1936, and the circus finally passed out of the Ringling family’s hands in 1967, when it was purchased by the Feld family.
The company also maintained the Ringling Museum of the Circus in Sarasota, Florida, and Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin, where many of the original circus wagons were restored and are exhibited.
In 2015 Feld Entertainment, the corporate parent of Ringling, announced that the circus would no longer feature elephant acts, a response to decades of complaints by animal-rights advocates that the circus mistreated the animals. The resulting decline in ticket sales, however, led to Feld’s decision in 2017 to close the circus in May of that year.
Today, The Ringling, the State Art Museum of Florida, is home to one of the preeminent art and cultural collections in the United States. Its story begins nearly a century ago, with the circus impresario and his beloved wife’s shared love for Sarasota, Italy, and art.
John Ringling was one of the five brothers who owned and operated the circus rightly called “The Greatest Show on Earth.” His success with the circus and entrepreneurial skills helped to make him, in the Roaring Twenties, one of the richest men in America, with an estimated worth of nearly $200 million.
In 1911, John and his wife, Mable, purchased 20 acres of waterfront property in Sarasota. In 1912, they began spending winters in what was then still a small town.
They became active in the community and purchased more and more real estate, at one time owning more than 25 percent of Sarasota’s total area.
After a few years the couple decided to build a house and hired the noted New York architect Dwight James Baum to design it. Mable, who kept a portfolio filled with sketches, postcards and photos, wanted a home in the Venetian Gothic style of the palazzi in Venice, Italy, with Sarasota Bay serving as her Grand Canal. Construction began in 1924 and was completed two years later at a then staggering cost of $1.5 million. Five stories tall, the 36,000 square foot mansion has 41 rooms and 15 bathrooms.
Mable supervised every aspect of the building, down to the mixing of the terra cotta and the glazing of the tiles. Today, the entrance to the grounds is through the Venetian gothic gateway where the Ringlings welcomed their guests to the opulent Ca’ d’Zan, or “House of John” in the Venetian dialect.
The Museum of Art. While traveling through Europe in search of acts for his circus, John Ringling, in the spirit of America’s wealthiest Gilded Age industrialists, began acquiring art and gradually built a significant collection. The more he collected, the more passionate and voracious a collector he became, educating himself and working with dealers such as Julius Bohler. He began buying and devouring art books – that would become the foundation of the Ringling Art Library.
Soon after the completion of Ca’ d’Zan, John built a 21-gallery museum modeled on the Florentine Uffizi Gallery to house his treasure trove of paintings and art objects, highlighted by his collection of Old Masters, including Velazquez, Poussin, van Dyke and Rubens. The result is the museum and a courtyard filled with replicas of Greek and Roman sculpture, including a bronze cast of Michelangelo’s David.
John opened the Museum of Art to the public in 1931, two years after the death of his beloved Mable, saying he hoped it would “promote education and art appreciation, especially among our young people.” Five years later, upon his death, Ringling bequeathed it to the people of Florida...
Budding Promoter
P.T. Barnum was born Phineas Taylor Barnum on July 5, 1810, in Bethel, Connecticut. A natural salesman, he was peddling snacks and cherry rum to soldiers by age 12. Barnum moved to New York City as a young man and tried his hand at a variety of businesses, including newspaper publishing and running a boarding house.
In 1835, Barnum's knack for promotion surfaced when he paid $1,000 for an elderly slave named Joice Heth. Claiming she was 161 years old and a former nurse for George Washington, Barnum exhibited her throughout the northeast region, raking in an estimated $1,500 per week.
Barnum's American Museum
P.T. Barnum bought Scudder's American Museum in lower Manhattan in 1841 and reopened it as Barnum's American Museum. There he displayed the "Feejee Mermaid" and other oddities of dubious authenticity among what eventually expanded to a collection of 850,000 exhibits.
In 1842, Barnum met 4-year-old Charles Sherwood Stratton, who stood 25 inches tall and weighed 15 pounds. Sensing another potential windfall, Barnum trained the boy to sing and dance and revealed him to the public as "General Tom Thumb." The massive popularity of the exhibit led to a traveling tour of Europe, which included an audience with British monarch Queen Victoria.
In July 1865, Barnum's American Museum burned to the ground in a massive fire. The promoter soon opened another museum at a nearby location, but this one also was demolished by a fire, in March 1868.
'The Greatest Show on Earth'
After retiring from the museum business, Barnum teamed with circus owners Dan Castello and William C. Coup to launch P.T. Barnum's Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Hippodrome in 1871. Referring to the traveling spectacle as "The Greatest Show on Earth," Barnum took full ownership of the successful venture by 1875.
In 1881, Barnum joined forces with fellow circus managers James A. Bailey and James L. Hutchinson. The following year they introduced "Jumbo," an enormous 11 1/2-foot, 6 1/2-ton elephant from the Royal Zoological Society in London. As with many of Barnum's previous exhibits, Jumbo was a hit with audiences, until his death in 1885.
In 1887, an aging Barnum agreed to cede everyday control of the circus, which was rebranded as the Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth.
Jenny Lind Tour
Although he became famous for championing the weird and wacky, one of Barnum's most successful ventures came with the promotion of Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind in the early 1850s. After hearing about her sold-out concerts in Europe, Barnum made the "Swedish Nightingale" an offer of $1,000 per performance for 150 shows in the United States and Canada, a tour which earned him a huge profit of more than $500,000. A very considerable sum at that point in time!
Bridgeport Booster
In addition to his show-business career, Barnum sought to transform his adopted hometown of Bridgeport, Connecticut, into a thriving metropolis. He went bankrupt after attempting to lure the doomed Jerome Clock Company to Bridgeport in the 1850s, but repaired his financial standing through public-speaking engagements and additional touring with General Tom Thumb.
Barnum went on to serve multiple terms in the Connecticut Legislature and was elected mayor of Bridgeport in 1875. He helped found the Bridgeport Hospital soon afterward, and was named its first president.
Death and Legacy
Confined to his Bridgeport home after suffering a stroke in 1890, Barnum died on April 7, 1891. A businessman to the end, he allegedly asked about the previous night's gate receipts at the circus with his final words.
The Barnum & Bailey show was bought by the rival Ringling brothers in 1907, and in 1919 the two were incorporated into the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows.
Thanks in part to the enduring success of his circus, Barnum is celebrated as a brilliant promoter and a man who transformed the nature of commercial entertainment in the 19th century. He is also remembered for his philanthropic contributions and investments in the city of Bridgeport, where exhibits of his life and the curiosities he brought to the public are featured at the Barnum Museum.
In 2000, an online version of Barnum's bygone American Museum reopened, as the Lost Museum. In May 2017, the long-running extravaganza he founded, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus, delivered its final performance. Later that year, Barnum's story made it to the big screen in "The Greatest Showman," with Hugh Jackman in the starring role.
Article Title: P.T. Barnum Biography.com Author Website Name The Biography.com website
Who Were the Ringling Brothers?
Charles and John Ringling along with their brothers Albert and Otto, founded the Ringling Bros. Circus in 1884, in Baraboo, Wisconsin. By the 1930s, the Ringling Bros. were among the most famous American entrepreneurs, and were known throughout the world.
Ringling's original surname Runegling family of American circus proprietors who created the Ringling Brothers circus empire in the late 19th century.
The members active in founding and running the family’s circus enterprises were all brothers: Albert C. (1852–1916), Otto (1858–1911), Alfred T. (1861–1919), Charles (1863–1926), John (1866–1936), and occasionally August G. (1854–1907) and Henry (1869–1918) Ringling.
The sons of August Rüngeling, a German-born harness maker, Charles, Albert, Otto, Alfred, and John in 1882 formed a song-and-dance troupe, the Classic and Comic Concert Co., and went on the road with it for two seasons. They began adding circus acts to their show, and they organized their first small circus, which opened on May 19, 1884, in their hometown of Baraboo, Wisconsin; from there they toured the U.S. Midwest. Their progress was slow until they acquired their first elephant in 1888, after which the circus expanded rapidly. Charles was the guiding managerial force behind the circus for many years.
In 1890 the Ringling Brothers first began loading their circus wagons on railway cars, enabling them to make a much longer tour. By 1900 the Ringling Brothers were actively competing with the Barnum & Bailey Circus, and they subsequently started buying up other circuses. They acquired the Forepaugh-Sells Circus in 1906, and, after James A. Bailey's death in 1906, they bought the Barnum & Bailey Circus in 1907, thus becoming the leading circus in the country.
After Charles’s death in 1926, John ran the empire alone for 10 years. In 1929 he bought the American Circus Corporation, thus bringing a total of 11 major circuses under Ringling control. By this time the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus had a main-tent seating capacity of 10,000. John died in 1936, and the circus finally passed out of the Ringling family’s hands in 1967, when it was purchased by the Feld family.
The company also maintained the Ringling Museum of the Circus in Sarasota, Florida, and Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin, where many of the original circus wagons were restored and are exhibited.
In 2015 Feld Entertainment, the corporate parent of Ringling, announced that the circus would no longer feature elephant acts, a response to decades of complaints by animal-rights advocates that the circus mistreated the animals. The resulting decline in ticket sales, however, led to Feld’s decision in 2017 to close the circus in May of that year.
Today, The Ringling, the State Art Museum of Florida, is home to one of the preeminent art and cultural collections in the United States. Its story begins nearly a century ago, with the circus impresario and his beloved wife’s shared love for Sarasota, Italy, and art.
John Ringling was one of the five brothers who owned and operated the circus rightly called “The Greatest Show on Earth.” His success with the circus and entrepreneurial skills helped to make him, in the Roaring Twenties, one of the richest men in America, with an estimated worth of nearly $200 million.
In 1911, John and his wife, Mable, purchased 20 acres of waterfront property in Sarasota. In 1912, they began spending winters in what was then still a small town.
They became active in the community and purchased more and more real estate, at one time owning more than 25 percent of Sarasota’s total area.
After a few years the couple decided to build a house and hired the noted New York architect Dwight James Baum to design it. Mable, who kept a portfolio filled with sketches, postcards and photos, wanted a home in the Venetian Gothic style of the palazzi in Venice, Italy, with Sarasota Bay serving as her Grand Canal. Construction began in 1924 and was completed two years later at a then staggering cost of $1.5 million. Five stories tall, the 36,000 square foot mansion has 41 rooms and 15 bathrooms.
Mable supervised every aspect of the building, down to the mixing of the terra cotta and the glazing of the tiles. Today, the entrance to the grounds is through the Venetian gothic gateway where the Ringlings welcomed their guests to the opulent Ca’ d’Zan, or “House of John” in the Venetian dialect.
The Museum of Art. While traveling through Europe in search of acts for his circus, John Ringling, in the spirit of America’s wealthiest Gilded Age industrialists, began acquiring art and gradually built a significant collection. The more he collected, the more passionate and voracious a collector he became, educating himself and working with dealers such as Julius Bohler. He began buying and devouring art books – that would become the foundation of the Ringling Art Library.
Soon after the completion of Ca’ d’Zan, John built a 21-gallery museum modeled on the Florentine Uffizi Gallery to house his treasure trove of paintings and art objects, highlighted by his collection of Old Masters, including Velazquez, Poussin, van Dyke and Rubens. The result is the museum and a courtyard filled with replicas of Greek and Roman sculpture, including a bronze cast of Michelangelo’s David.
John opened the Museum of Art to the public in 1931, two years after the death of his beloved Mable, saying he hoped it would “promote education and art appreciation, especially among our young people.” Five years later, upon his death, Ringling bequeathed it to the people of Florida...
THE GREAT FIVE RINGLING BROTHERS
On this site, there will be future additions to the history of the great
Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus!
Charles Elias Disney, Daniel H. Disney, Cristian Petrea Disney
Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus!
Charles Elias Disney, Daniel H. Disney, Cristian Petrea Disney