Times change. What was a photograph of a thrilling circus parade through Portsmouth’s Market Square now looks like a snapshot of animal abuse. I counted what appears to be a dozen elephants plodding past the Portsmouth Athenaeum where this digital image was created from a rare negative. It seems the fitting epilogue to my recent stories about Tom Thumb and circus mogul Phineas T. Barnum.
In 2017 New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill banning the use of elephants in parades and other entertainment events. The bill went into effect in 2019. “The use of elephants in these types of settings is dangerous to their health and potentially abusive,” Cuomo said in a media statement. “The Elephant Protection Act furthers this administration’s efforts to fight animal cruelty, and create a stronger, more humane New York.”
With the use of performing wild animals being banned around the globe, Ringling Bros. announced in 2017 that it would close its “Greatest Show on Earth” after 146 years. The next generation of circus viewers will have to stick with blockbuster animated films like the recent “Greatest Showman” about P.T. Barnum or the latest incarnation of the Disney film “Dumbo.”
Records indicate that this photo was taken in June of 1902 as the Forepaugh and Sells Brothers’ Circus held its annual parade from the train station to the big top set up in Brackett’s Field. As readers of this column know, Portsmouth had been host to a caged lion, elephants, moose, and other wild animals as part of the city’s itinerant “lewd amusements” since the late 1700s. Traveling early circus shows with human and animal acts were popular in the early 1800s. Live horses galloped across the Music Hall stage in a Wild West drama.
A rare “streamer” broadside from 1857, long before Barnum’s circus appeared, advertised a Noha’s Ark of wild animals on display in a Portsmouth field for 15 cents. The caged menagerie included two African lions, a horned horse, leopard, hyena, jackal, gnu, lynx, wild cat, bear, and anteater plus “a wilderness of mokeys, baboons, and apes.” and more.
Copyright J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved
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