History of the Circus in Florida
The Circus, and later the smaller Carnival, are strange archaic places full of left over magic from the old world. Yes they can be dangerous. Some of the elementals attracted to these ventures can be shady at best, but it is a world where most are welcome and all talents are valued. This avenue of entertainment has been around forever as a refuge for those who no one wants, those who need to survive, and those who simply have star and sawdust in their souls.
The word “Circus” is a Latin word that means “Circle” and while the circus as an organized entertainment venue is really not that old, the elements which make it up are ancient. Guess they just all decided to come together in a time of need, whatever that need may have been…
The Equestrians go back to before 1400 BC to ancient Turkey. The acrobat and the juggler go as far back in history as 2000 BC. The clown as far back as 2400 BC. The fortune tellers, 4000 BC. So while the circus as we know it originally formed in 1782 Paris, it’s foundations were out in the world for a very long time.
The Reunglings, a German immigrant family, started in 1870 as “The Ringling Brothers United Monster Shows, Great Double Circus, Royal European Menagerie, Museum, Caravan, and Congress of Trained Animals.” That’s one hell of a name. I like the “Monster Shows” part… John Ringling and his 4 brothers, the future founders of Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey Circus, would get his start here, with his family.
It was early morning and the sun was just peeking up over the mirror flat Gulf of Mexico. Brilliant slashes of fuschia and orange backed by dark blue gray clouds split the sky. John and Mable sat on the beach on an old blanket and made a joint decision to buy the property, it was 1910 and they were getting older…
Ca d’Zan or “House of John” was a 30 room mansion built on the Ringling’s new property and completed in 1926. Mable and John joined the Sarasota social scene, built The Ringling fine arts gallery on the property and helped with the development of Sarasota, Florida in general. In 1927 he made it the official winter home of the circus. The prior winter home was in Connecticut. By 1929 John Ringling had acquired all of the circuses in America making him truly the “Circus King” and his castle was right here.
1929 was also the year Mabel died and left John heartbroken and alone in the middle of the Great Depression. With Mabel went his luck… Over the years John Ringling would lose pretty much everything but his house in Sarasota. He died in 1936 in New York with less than $400.00 in the bank.
He willed his home and land in Sarasota to the state who in turn, turned it into the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. His nephew ran the Ringling Bros. Circus for a short time until it was sold to a few different people over the years.
The Ringling money paved the way for many interesting, artistic and eclectic people to move into the Sarasota area. The only clown college in the nation ran here from 1967-1997. The Ringling School of Art and Design is named in John Ringling’s honor. If your dream was to run off and join the circus, here was and probably still is, the best place to start. If your parents actually ever did sell you to the circus, you might have been a resident of this next place…
Gibsonton, Florida
In 1949, a giant and his tiny wife found a home to retire for the winter just south of Tampa, Florida. Al Tomaini was billed as the Giant. A famous 8ft 41/2in tall man with a 22in shoe. His wife was Jeanie, the 2ft 5in tall, born legless, Acrobatic Half-Woman. Once labeled the World’s Strangest Married Couple until dethroned by Monkey Girl and Alligator Man, the pair would go on to found one of the World’s Strangest Communities in Florida.
Gibsonton or “Gibtown” was once the winter home to a variety of carnies, circus workers and sideshow celebrities. It was the 1940’s and one of the most popular times in history for the Freak shows within the Carnivals and Circuses. They needed a place to rest and while the circus folks had Sarasota, the Giant and his wife decided to take this little town on the outskirts. Due to those circus folks and the Ringling Brothers influence, Hillsborough County had some pretty lax laws about tigers or Ferris wheels in the front yard.
Many a sideshow celebrity called Gibtown home. The Hilton Siamese Twin Sisters ran a fruit stand. The Giant and Jeanie had a trailer park and fish camp. Dottie the Fat Lady, the Alligator Man and his wife the Monkey Girl… None were in the news as much as Lobster Boy though. Grady Stiles shot his future son in law one day in 1978. Unfortunately the saga would continue years later when he would become a victim himself of a murder for hire in 1992.
Like Gypsies, Pirates and other mysterious and dangerous Fictional beings, Carnies have never had too good of a reputation. With the bad press surrounding the Lobster family, Gibtown tried to go low key and sort of sunk deep into the past.
As we move into the future we say goodbye to crazy, scary clowns, popcorn, candy apples and cotton candy on heavily perfumed breezes, faith on terrifying creaky rides with sloe eyed and questionable operators… We say goodbye to the Gypsies, Hecklers and Fortune Tellers in the Midway… We say goodbye to magic and the stars of God high above twinkling lights strung up by man. We say goodbye to us.
Back in the days of the carny folks the population of Gibsonton was about 8,000 in the winter, much less in the summer. Last count in 2010 the population of Gibsonton was over 14,000 and none of them were in the show business. But some of the old folks are still there. The International Independent Showman’s Association makes sure the carnival stays alive.
Cassadaga
While the circus and carnivals are full of wonderful entertainers, one of the most mysterious and least seen anymore is the Fortune Teller’s booth. Nestled into some dark corner you have to seek out, hoping to catch some glimpse of money or distant romance in her crystal ball… You follow the incense on the air to her tent…
They too sought out the carnival for refuge. From the late 1800’s well into the early 1930’s spiritualism was a huge occupation in the country. Ghosts getting pulled out of eternity all over the place.
People loved it so much, they wrote songs about it and this one, In a Little Gypsy Tea Room from 1935, was a top hit.
Around the end of the 30’s though things began to change. As tea rooms and psychic parlors were raided and shut down, mediums were turned into criminals. Some of those people were driven to find other means of collecting their income and joined the carnivals and circuses.
We have a home here in Florida for those practitioners of ancient arts. Founded in 1895, Cassadaga is much older than the Ringlings or the carnival in Florida. Maybe they knew they were coming… The town is situated far enough away but just close enough, like the gypsy’s tent on the edge of the carnival, sits Cassadaga, home of the Fortune Tellers. Psychic Capital of the World.
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My mother took me there every year. We would drive down from St. Augustine, get lunch somewhere and have our futures read. It was always the great mystery of Cassadaga. Would we find it? Back in those days it was not on any map. There were no clear directions to the place. You either found it or you didn’t. On many occasions I tried to go there myself and never did find it. Just drove around Deland and Lake Helen.. It’s not like it’s a hard place to find.
We never went to the “certified psychics” across the way at the hotel. It was my mom’s belief that if a psychic charged too much they were not any good. You’re not supposed to charge anyways she would grumble. So we went to the Purple Rose and the one on the corner… Sometimes we would go into the white house across the other street from the hotel and mess around in there. We would drive around and look at the houses. We’d comment on the water level of the lake and pass the cemetery.
Cassadaga is a place that feels like home to me though many in the town now would never know how much. Cassadaga is also the Home of the Southern Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp Meeting Association and someone one day proclaimed it the “psychic capital of the world”… I don’t know about the world, but it definitely is the psychic capital of Florida.
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Spiritualism in the 1800’s was a big deal. Mediums and psychics conducted seances to talk to the dead all over the place. America was a hotbed of activity, namely the Lily Dale Assembly in New York. Medium George Colby, following the advice of an ancient Seneca spirit, came to Florida to create the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp. It was patterned after Lily Dale, and the entire town would be a home for mediums, healers and psychics.
He bought 35 acres for his camp in 1895 and so began a long era of summoning the spirits in Central Florida. It is an era that lives on today. With over 100 psychics and holistic healers, any traveler is welcome to have their fortune told should they wish… If they can find it that is.
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Florida’s Fabulous Two Headed Animals
While the Freak shows were the main attractions for the traveling carnivals, animal shows were almost as popular. Two headed cows and other anomalies of nature were displayed, usually in their taxidermied form.
Polycephaly is the condition of having two heads. In animals it is known as bicephaly or dicephaly. It is caused when an embryo does not split properly into two different fetuses like it should. This condition could be attributed to pollution or environmental factors as it has not been found in genetics. What kind of pollution or environmental factors is the question, as one of our animals below was born back in the 1920’s.
Cows
In 1925 an interesting calf was born in Safety Harbor, Florida. It not only had two heads, but six legs and two tails as well. When the calf passed away the owner had it taxidermied and it’s permanent home is at the St. Petersburg Museum of History. In 2017 the museum held a contest where people could choose a proper name for the calf. “Half & Half” was the winning title.
On an early morning in late April of 2015, not far from the Olustee Battlefield Park, a Baker County Florida dairy farmer went to check on a newly born calf. He was shocked to find that the calf had two heads. She was named Annabel. Unfortunately like most two headed bovines, she did not live long after her birth.
Snakes
This is one very ssspecial sssnake… Around Halloween in 2011, Daniel Parker, a University of Central Florida biologist and owner of Sunshine Serpent Adventures in Lakeland, Florida; noticed something odd about the newborn Honduran Milk Snake before him. It had two heads. Not only did it have two heads, but it was also a beautiful orange and white albino. Truly a one in a million. Two headed snakes in general are rare but more common than say… A two headed cow. This snake was different. This snake was exceptional, extremely rare, healthy and thriving as both heads worked in cooperation for food and water. Normally a problem with two headed animals in general.
“Medusa” was sold to a gentleman who specializes in two headed animals named Todd Ray and was doing very well as of 2015 in her new home at the Venice Beach Freakshow of Venice Beach, CA. Unfortunately the Freakshow was forced to close its location in 2017 but Mr. Ray did suggest that moving it to Los Vegas might be a future possibility.
Sharks
Florida is the shark bite capital of the world and a good number of those bites or attacks are unprovoked.
Bull sharks can account for 20% of those unprovoked attacks. That’s a lot when you compare it to a chart
featuring 10 different breeds of sharks. Now imagine if you will a world where very special Bull sharks have
two heads… Maybe someday that will come about but as of now we have no known survivors. All of
the two-headed embryos or fetuses that have been found have died before or right after birth. The photos
here are from the first known two headed shark ever found. A fisherman caught the mother shark in the Gulf of Mexico
in April of 2011 and discovered this while cleaning the fish. He donated the specimen to the Florida Keys
Community College who in turn sent it to Michigan State University for further examination. There was some
talk that it may have been the result of pollution in the Gulf, but since this one was found, a few more have
popped up around the world. Think about that next time you enter the ocean…
Cats
Diprosopus – A Greek word meaning two faced and it applies here to a certain type of feline known as a Janus cat. It’s as close to two-headed as a cat can get and one was born in Port Charlotte, Florida in February of 2012. This guy was a very special little black cat with two faces. His folks named him “Harvey Dent” after the Batman villain.
Sea Turtles
The two headed sea turtle seems to be more common than most other creatures here, except maybe the snake. A regular snake. Over the years biologists and students alike have found the random two headed baby sea turtle. In 2012 a biologist on Juniper Beach found one and in 2017 two researchers with the University of Central Florida found one on a Miami beach. So what do they do with them? Help them get to the water with all the other baby turtles. So someday, if your out there diving and see a big beautiful two headed Loggerhead sea turtle, give him a thumbs up cause he made it.
http://www.equestrianandhorse.com/equestrian/history.html
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http://www.juggling.org/books/artists/history.html
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https://www.theatreinparis.com/blog/the-evolution-of-the-circus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ringling
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The Strangest Couple In The World
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http://gibtownshowmensclub.com/Default.asp?
https://medium.com/florida-history/the-mystery-and-spirit-of-cassadaga-8a0058b024b1
Circus, Carnivals and Fortune Tellers- Historical Facts
https://www.news4jax.com/news/2015/04/29/holy-cow-2-faced-calf-born-in-baker-county/
https://www.nbc-2.com/story/15917029/two-headed-albino-snake-hatched-in-florida
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/man-pays-50000-for-2-headed-albino-snake_n_55e9ee14e4b002d5c075fe32
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https://www.businessinsider.com/creepy-new-picture-of-two-headed-bull-shark-2013-3
Kitten born with two faces named Harvey Dent after Batman villain
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/environment/article167999182.html