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The adoption of the cookhouse by circuses was a direct reflection of the increase in the size of companies in the years just before the Civil War.
Since the beginning of tented touring employees had been lodged and fed in hotels along the route. When the entire personnel of a company was about thirty people - performers and workmen - the cost and availability of hotel living was not a major item. A man and a horse could be fed and housed for as little as fifty cents a day or as much as a dollar depending on the local price structure. This sum provided two meals and half a bed for the man, feed and straw for the animal as well as stabling at the hotel.
As the size of rosters expanded in the 1850s managers began to seek some relief from the added costs of food and lodging. Also, the number of people employed began to strain the resources of small town hostelries. Most hotels could put up twenty or so guests, two to a bed, thus a circus company had to take rooms in several inns in order to have accommodation. In the smaller towns it was possible not to find enough rooms to accommodate a hundred people. One solution was to spread straw on the floor of a room, nail a tarpaulin over it and let as many working men squeeze in as could. A better solution was to feed and house the workmen, but not the staff and performers, on the lot.
James E. Cooper, proprietor of the Adam Forepaugh Show, died on the first day of the year 1892. In its obituary of this man the New York Clipper of January 9 called him “one of the greatest showmen of the world.” It also stated that in 1864 he had originated the cook tent, blacksmith shop and horse tent on the circus lot.
This information was supplied to the Clipper by the showman himself during his lifetime, according to editorial comment in the 30 January issue. At two different intervals he had sent minute biographical data to the publication. The reason for the editor’s stating this was a letter received from a reader disputing the fact that Cooper had introduced the cook house and the horse tent.
The writer, William M. Davis Jr., was characterized by the Clipper as a veteran showman, as indeed he was. Davis had begun his career with the James Raymond organization in 1845, and remained with it through the season of 1851. In 1852 he became an agent for the Mabie show and was with that company nine consecutive years. In the fall of 1857 he was named manager, a position he held through 1860. In 1861 he reverted to agent. Of his subsequent career we know only that he was with W. W. Cole in 1871, Cole’s first year as an independent operator. After that season Davis retired.
Under date of 19 January 1892 he wrote the Clipper to say that he, Davis, not Cooper had originated the idea of a camp outfit (“camp” was the contemporary term for “lot”) and said “While acting as manager in 1857 I prevailed on the Mabies to get a cooking outfit and sleeping and horse tents, contending that sooner or later all shows would be compelled to do similarly. [Jerry] Mabie went to Cincinnati and ordered a camp outfit consisting of sleeping tents for seventy people, a dining tent, cook wagon and horse tents, the outfit costing about $1300. The same year I introduced the concert under the large tent. These two radical changes, proving successful, were soon taken up by other shows, and have continued to the present time.”
What Davis’ letter does not make clear was that the equipment was first used in 1858. He suggested it, however, in 1857.
His claim was quickly verified by two veteran showmen, James DeMott and George S. Cole. Both members of the Mabie aggregation, DeMott as clown and Cole as treasurer, wrote in, their missives appearing in the 6 February issue.
I wish to confirm the statement of William Davis,” DeMott wrote, “in reference to the first camp or cooking apparatus for the accommodation of circuses. The range in the wagon was the most complete I have ever seen, and the wagon was finely furnished. They also carried tents for men to sleep in, with portable bedsteads and air pillows. This, I think, was before the late J. E. Cooper thought of the show business at all.” Cooper’s first essay into circus life was, indeed, not until 1863.
Cole merely seconded Davis’ description. Then, James Esler, ringmaster for Mabie in 1856 and most of 1857, put his two-cents worth in via a letter in the issue of 13 February in which he said that it was 1858, not 1857 in which the camping outfit was first used. He had misread Davis’ description. Further, Esler said that it was Walter Waterman’s idea. He had this, he claimed, from Jerry Mabie himself. This makes no difference in the awarding to the Mabie’s of the prize for introduction of the cookhouse, but Esler then proceeded to name the personnel of the 1857 “Mabie Grand Consolidation of Circus and Menagerie,” its full title, and thereby raised our suspicion that he was confused. He says E. W. Perry was equestrian manager (it was W. H. Stout); that Bobbie Williams was clown (he wasn’t on the show); that the Holland family were present (they weren’t). And, to top all of it off, Walter Waterman was not with the Mabie aggregation in either 1857 or 1858. Davis pointed these errors out in his last letter, which was printed on 27 February.
“The dispute is an amicable one,” he wrote, “and while not particularly valuable to the general public, it is not devoid of interest to the circus fraternity.” And to circus historians, we might add. ‘There does not seem to be much controversy about my being the first to introduce camp life,” Davis concluded.
Davis had been involved in the earliest example of feeding on the lot, oddly enough, though he didn’t mention it in his letters to the Clipper. In 1851 he was on the staff of the Raymond & Van Amburgh menagerie when that company experimented with the idea. The Hancock Journal of Fostoria, Ohio, editorialized on 15 August of that year “on the niggard disposition of the proprietors in refusing to be accommodated by our local landlords during their stay . . . they erected a shanty and fried their bacon by a camp fire.”
Whether or not the working men also slept on the lot was not indicated, nor do we think they fed on the lot in subsequent seasons. One question we have is if Davis urged Jerry Mabie to purchase the camp outfit because he had seen the Raymond & Van Amburgh experiment.
As Davis indicated, the improvements cost about $1,500. They were bought from the Vandiver tent people in Cincinnati and he said they were delivered in a month. Since seventy men and as many as fifty horses and three elephants were housed and fed under the new arrangement, we would estimate that the saving in hotel costs over a season would amount to roughly $5,000.
With this size of a saving one would suppose that every showman would rush to purchase a camp outfit, but our research, which is not detailed after 1860, does not reveal another use of the innovation until 1866 when Gardner & Hemmings adopted it.
We must thank John Polacsek for the reference in the Fostoria, Ohio newspaper.
CHS webmaster J. Griffin, last modified December 2005.