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Thursday, December 16, 2004

Ed Lentz

Elephants have been in the local news more often in the recent past than one might imagine for a town in the Midwestern heartland like Columbus.

We learned that the Columbus Zoo might have been the recipient of a couple of pachyderms from Detroit if everything had come together appropriately. Everything didn't. So we won't.

But to take our minds off those elephants, Ringling Brothers brought theirs to town and marched them into the city in a line, as one circus or another has been doing for more than a century. In fact, Columbus has always liked a good animal show. In the days of frontier taverns, one of the more interesting attractions was the occasional bull, bear or even a wild pig, which might be baited or even wrestled by local people foolish enough to pay for the privilege.

In later years, this was followed by traveling menageries of rather forlorn animals who were paraded and exhibited to a public whose previous exposure to exotic fauna had probably been a look at the taxidermy in Walcutt's Dime Museum.

But in the years after the Civil War, the one event that brought strange animals to Columbus in an era before zoos was when the circus came to town.

Actually, attractions that were something like a circus had come to the city as early as the 1830s with the arrival of the Ohio Canal and the National Road. But the shows were small, the performers limited in both talent and repertory and the animals -- if any -- not all that interesting.

All of this changed after the War Between the States. In a short time, major shows began to assemble themselves and travel across America, bringing the joy and amazement of the circus to much of the country. And one of the greatest of these traveling extravaganzas was based right here in the capital city.

In the years immediately after the Civil War, four enterprising brothers named Sells left the family home in what is now Dublin. If they did not run away to join the circus, they at least walked briskly to seek fame and fortune.

They found both. By the end of the 19th century, the Sells Brothers Circus was the second-largest in the United States. In the opinion of many, this circus may not have been the biggest but it was by far the best.

How did this come to pass? How did a small Midwestern state capital become the headquarters and remain the home of such a large and successful national enterprise?

Like the responses to many simple questions, the answers are not so simple.

Part of the success of the Sells Brothers Circus rested with the brothers who brought it into being. Different in personality and manner, the four Sells brothers shared a fierce drive to succeed and a legendary ability to work incredibly long hours in all sorts of weather to insure that their shows did indeed go on. They also were gifted with a strong sense of showmanship and an almost uncanny ability to recognize the coming trends in their business before most of the competition did.

Nothing illustrates this better than the picture accompanying our story today. We are looking a railroad car for the "Sells Brothers Great European Circus and Menagerie."

This may not seem all that interesting, since most circuses moved by train for most of the last century.

But when this picture was taken in 1879, a circus on wheels was still something of a novelty. Most circuses moved by wagon, as indeed had the Sells Brothers show when it was founded in 1872. When the train came to town, the great parade down the main street to drum up business was still done in gaily decorated wagons.

The big difference in circuses came when the show left town. Circuses limited to wagon travel could only move limited distances in decent weather and the shows were rather small. A circus traveling by train could take more people, more animals and more appurtenances for much longer distances.

To do this required a place to base oneself that was at the hub of number of railroads.

Columbus was just that sort of place in the late 1800s. A center of rail traffic since the 1850s, Columbus had seen its rail network greatly enhanced by Civil War construction.

At the end of the war, Columbus was a rail hub from which much of the country could be reached in a day or two.

If one combined the showmanship of the Sells Brothers with the efficiency of rail travel, the result was what is also described on the rail car -- a "7 Elephant Railroad." The circus in both Europe and America has always been many different shows. A midway of strange (if egregiously exaggerated) "attractions" and simplistic (if often rigged) "games of chance" competed with clowns, aerial artistes and animal acts for the attention of visitors to the show.

The Sells Brothers -- more than most circus owners -- recognized that people who came to the circus not only wanted to be entertained and amused. Many of them wanted to be thrilled and amazed as well. So acts that defied death were always popular. Exotic trained animals were a delight as well. And the elephant seemed to capture the essence of the circus more than most other animals in the show -- more than the lions and tigers and bears -- and much more than the traditional "dog and pony" show.

And if one elephant was interesting, seven elephants in the same show were nothing less than astonishing. Or at least so it seemed to several generations of visitors to the Sells Brothers Circus.

Each autumn, the circus would return to its winter quarters in the village of Sellsville across the river from The Ohio State University. And each spring, for more than 30 years, it would set out to see much of America and the world once again.

Like many good things, it finally ended after the turn of the 20th century. The brothers grew older.

Disastrous accidents and tragedies took their toll. And new forms of entertainment, like the amusement park and the motion picture, were here as well. After the death of the last of the four brothers in 1907, the show was closed.

In the wake of its departure, Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey's eventually became, in truth as well as parlance, "The Greatest Show on Earth." When that circus comes to town in our time, its elephants still stride in line as they always have, and the spirit of the Sells Brothers circus lives again.

Ed Lentz writes a history column for ThisWeek.