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The birthplace of the American circus is a child's paradise. They play in relics that preserve a magic past.
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by K. C. Jerome
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A statue of "Old Bet," first star of
the circus, stands before the hotel
which was center of former showlife.
In 1815 Hachaliah Bailey was peacefully
working his farm and serving as postmaster in
Somers, N. Y., when his brother, a sea captain, came
into port with an unusual cargo an elephant.
Hachaliah went down to New York harbor and
was delighted with what he saw. He paid $1,000 for
the beast, named Old Bet, and began traveling the
countryside exhibiting her.
Later Bailey added some monkeys and a bear and
took his menagerie as far as New England and
Canada. Old Bet soon earned enough money for
Bailey to build the Elephant Hotel in Somers, and in
front of the hotel he erected a statue of the pachy
derm atop a granite shaft.
At first, Hachaliah's neighbors snickered, and local
preachers even threatened, eternal damnation to
anyone connected with the circus. But it wasn't
long before circus fever spread all around Somers.
Four of Bailey's neighbors, for example, acquired
a circus called the Zoological Institute. The whole
neighborhood, some 50 miles from New York City,
became a hotbed for seedling circuses. It was said
of a ball given at Bailey's Elephant Hotel:
"At one time on the floor there were individuals
whose aggregate wealth amounted to upwards of
five million dollars and the foundations of whose
fortunes were laid in the exhibition of wild animals
throughout the United States."
More than a century has passed since that ball.
Circuses have traveled a long road from their early
days around Somers.
And while Old Bet still stands atop her monu
ment, the Elephant Hotel now serves as Somers'
municipal building. But to some townsfolk, the
smell of sawdust and the clatter of the calliope are
still fresh. They plan a circus museum to com
memorate the fact that Somers was the birthplace
of America's traveling circus.
To raise money for the museum, they recently
held an exhibition of circus relics in the Elephant
Hotel. Amid the many colorful trappings of the big
top was a poster advertising the exhibition of a
woman said to be 161 years old and the nursemaid
of George Washington. "The greatest natural and
national curiosity in the world," it said, "she weighs
but 46 pounds, and yet is cheerful and interesting."
This attraction was one of the first circus ventures
by a young man from Bethel, Conn., only a few
miles from Somers. His name, of course, was
Phineas T. Barnum, the originator of "The Greatest
Show on Earth."
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