by Barbara Rimkunas
This "Historically Speaking" column was published in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, May 21, 2021.
“Our little quiet village today, is alive, there is a circus in town, and the railroad annual meeting meets here today, which brings people from all parts, some for amusement, some for Business, some to get money, and some to get rum, I have heard and saw more intoxicated today than I should want to see in a long life.” It is clear, from her diary entry on September 8th, 1852, that Hannah Brown was not a lover of frivolity. As a small shareholder of the Boston and Maine railroad, she attended the annual meeting and not the circus. What is not clear, from her diary, is whether the drunkenness she so disapproved of was the result of circus goers or rail investors.
The circus that Brown mentioned was the Robinson & Eldred Grand Southern Circus. If the show followed usual protocols, an advance team arrived about a week before the show to find a suitable location and pay the town’s license fees (at that time about $30.00). Local boys were hired to put up posters around town. Author Henry Shute wrote a hilarious account, fictionalized, but no doubt containing some truth, of his adventures pasting circus posters on carefully chosen fences of townspeople. They planned to put the elephant poster on the gate of a man known as “Fatty Fogg,” the stork in front of Mrs. Clarissa Dorson’s home and “the howling monkey we are going to put on the Methydist parsonage.” Of course, the plan didn’t go well. For various reasons, the posters were scrambled, and the sly jokesters wound up deeply offending numerous Exeter residents. Remnants of old circus posters occasionally turn up, as did the one on Lincoln Street discovered in 2001.
Arriving by wagons, most travelling circus shows entered town with a grand parade. According to the advertisement in the Exeter News-Letter, the Robinson & Eldred show set up “on the Elliott lot, fronting on Grove Street.” Hannah could have attended either the 2:00 matinee or the 8:00 evening show for 25 cents, had she deigned to lower her standards. These early circus shows were small and primarily made up of equestrian, acrobatic and clown acts. They were popular enough that in 1852 not one but two circuses arrived in Exeter within weeks of one another.
After the Civil War, travelling shows moved their venue in Exeter to the field behind the shoe shop on Front Street. The shows had become larger, including sideshows. P.T. Barnum brought his show to Exeter in 1871 combining Castello’s Grand Circus with his own travelling museum and menagerie. It was, he boasted, “the Largest, Most Novel, Most Interesting, and Most Comprehensive Exhibition in the World!” “Giants! Dwarfs! Freaks of Nature!” “100,000 Curiosities the Rarest Birds, Beasts and Reptiles.” Admission to the circus included admission to the side shows. The tour of 1871 was the only time Barnum brought a show to Exeter. The following year, he transported the show on the railroad, concentrating on larger towns and cities where the show could set up for a few days at a time. Exeter was only able to lure smaller shows after that.
But even the lesser-known circus troupes were exciting when they arrived. Exeter townsfolk have always loved parades and circus parades were particularly thrilling. The traditional touring routes brought the circus to New England in the late spring. 20-year-old Helen Tufts went to see the Walter Mains circus in 1918. Life was insecure that year. War had been declared in April; the first hints of a pandemic were beginning to surface. Even the advertising understood the anxiety of the times, hinting that many might need an excuse to attend. “It’s all right to alibi yourself; almost everybody has done the same time and time again. Does not the flash and glare and glitter have a lot to do with your enthusiasm for circuses? Don’t you like the scintillating brilliancy and gaudiness of the ensemble. Sure you do. So meet us in front of the elephants when the Walter L. Main shows are here, and we will throw trouble to the winds and peanuts to the elephants.” Helen went with family members. “Frances and I enjoyed it and stayed for the Wild West Show. The lassoo throwing was the most interesting. He did a lot of fancy swinging of the rope.” Programs that included a wild west element appealed to the nostalgia many people felt in that age of motorized cars – and tanks. It was a time when warfare was deeply horrific and far more murderous than earlier times. The circus has always been about escapism. No wonder Helen enjoyed the simplicity of rope tricks.
Circuses continued to come to town in the early 1900s, and then after 1921 they stopped, or at least there were no advertisements or accounts of the circus stopping in Exeter again until 1944. That July, the News-Letter felt the need to reassure the public, “Tests made Tuesday morning as to whether the ‘big top’ of the Hunt circus was combustible proved it was not, two policemen and two firemen were kept on the circus grounds all day as a precaution.” Hart had arrived a week after the tragic Hartford circus fire that had taken the lives of 167 people. Similar precautions were taken in 1946. The event was still popular. “Perhaps a thousand people attended the performances of the King Brothers Circus at the Epping Road show ground in the rear field of Marcel Zarnowski’s farm last Saturday,” reported the News-Letter. After that show, Exeter residents went to Portsmouth, Manchester or Concord to see the big shows. The Elks Club sponsored a circus in 1965, but no other notices of local shows appear. The days of the circus parade on Water Street were over.
Barbara Rimkunas is curator of the Exeter Historical Society. Support the Exeter Historical Society by becoming a member! Join online at: www.exeterhistory.org
Image: The Walter Main Circus came to Exeter on June 11th, 1918. It was advertised as a “good clean, high-class circus” and featured a wild west show.