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We are not often privy to the details of the lives of early American circus performers. Unless they achieved unusual renown there was little contemporary interest in their career. In fact, there was little interest in the circus itself until the time of the Civil War. Circus owners are fairly well documented and so are famous performers, men such as Levi J. North and Richard Sands. However, the middle-level performers, as a group, are probably less well-known to us than are the elephants of the day. This lack of information cannot be blamed on either the times or the profession of circus performer; it exists even today when only the biggest names in any field stay in the public memory. Few persons could tell us the name of the second baseman of the Detroit Tigers in the 1960s, without first researching the question.
Because of this situation, when we do find details of such a person’s career, we treat it with a respect out of proportion to his importance. In this paper we will do that for Oscar R. Stone.
He was born on December 3, 1815, on a farm near Pittstown, New York. At the age of twelve he was apprenticed to a tailor. Anyone who has read Charles Dickens is familiar with the lot of apprentices in the early nineteenth century. It was a continual round of duty, encompassing not only the master’s trade, but the menial tasks involving the household. After a short time, Stone grew weary of tending livestock, churning butter and similar tasks so he left his first position.
He apprenticed himself to another tailor in Bennington, Vermont, and then to a third in Troy until he had mastered enough of his trade to set himself up as a tailor in Hoosick Falls, New York. He was about nineteen years old at this time.
At some point in his life, Stone had seen a circus - we wish we knew which one - and claimed later to have been so impressed with the riders that he determined to become one himself. Knowing no one in the business, he set out to learn on his own.
It was not uncommon for boys to come home from the circus and try to emulate the routines they had seen there. The backyard circus was part of our culture until quite recently. However, many of the men who went on to make a career of the arena ran away from home as boys. We can point to Richard Sands, Dan Minnich, John Robinson and Eaton Stone as examples of this. Of course, the majority of performers began by being accepted as apprentices. We find newspaper ads in the nineteenth century asking for boys interested in becoming performers. However, here we have Oscar Stone, who proceeded to teach himself the art of circus riding.
He first purchased a horse, an almost unmanageable mare named Kitty Clover. She cost him twenty dollars and a gold watch. Somehow, he was able to handle her, as she was on his show as late as 1838. Then he found a coal pit in the woods about two miles out of Hoosick Falls. This had been dug by blacksmiths in the rough shape of a circus ring. By the use of stakes and boards Stone converted it into his practice arena. Every day after work he would take the mare to the coal pit and ride her round and round as they both learned the business. Interestingly, Stone did not use a pad or a saddle, but applied himself from the start to become a bareback rider. At this time, about 1835, there were only four or five bareback riders in America, so he had his heart set on joining a rather exclusive group.
Practicing in a coal pit did have some disadvantages. Stone is quoted as saying, “After some hours of practice on a hot summer’s evening I would return home utterly begrimed - the devil himself could not have distinguished me from one of his imps.”
With the approach of winter, some substitute had to be found for the coal bottom. Stone located a piece of ground in the village and spent $100 to erect a ring barn with a thatched roof. By this time he had accumulated enough money to purchase two more horses. With a couple of local boys he spent leisure evenings practicing horsemanship.
By early spring, 1836, Stone had five horses and had trained four boy riders and decided it was time to abandon the tailor’s trade for that of circus proprietor. He began by performing for pay in a four-day stand at his own arena. After that, he went to Read’s Hollow, west of Hoosick Falls, and enclosed an abandoned blacksmith shop with a board fence for use as an arena. It was still winter and the snow had to be shoveled away before performances could begin. Town elections were being held at Read’s Hollow during Stone’s stay there and this made for good business. Circuses in those days were always anxious to perform in a place where some public event was in progress. Election days, court settings, militia musters and school commencements were all considered good times at which to play a town.
Stone next visited North Adams, Massachusetts, where he had five days of “good business,” according to one source. From there he traveled to Albany. At the corner of Green and Division Streets he set up his show, presumably erecting an arena. He acquired two more horses and several men at this point, and began a six-week stand.
Among Stone’s performers in Albany was Mons. Gouff, the man-monkey, an Englishman whose real name was Goff. His specialty was donning a monkey suit and performing various stunts in the ring, including riding a horse. He made his American debut in Boston in 1831; we find him on English bills as early as 1825.
At the conclusion of the Albany stand Stone purchased a tent and wagons and was ready to tour as a full-fledged, albeit very small, traveling show. At the time a small menagerie and wax-figure exhibition with the title Hoadley, Latham & Eldred was in the Albany area and Stone agreed to throw in with them.
We don’t know who Hoadley was, but Latham had been in the menagerie business in the Albany area for some years. At one time, according to George Stone, Latham’s show had been destroyed by indignant citizens of Waterloo, New York, when it was discovered that his “whale” was made of shoe leather. This incident dates from about 1829, seven years before he met Stone.
The Eldred in the title was Gilbert N. Eldred, future partner of the great John Robinson. He had been employed until this year by his brother Edward Eldred. With the closing of the firm of Crane & Eldred at the end of the 1835 season, Gilbert was free to join Hoadley and Latham.
Stone was apparently not a partner in the firm, as his name was not in the title, nor for that matter, in the few newspaper ads we’ve found. The partners seemed more intent upon advertising their snake collection - boa constrictors and the like - than their self-taught bareback rider.
The show fell in behind J. W. Bancker’s American Arena Co. when it reached western New York State. There are several references in the literature to Bancker being driven off his route by the Zoological Institute in 1836. We have not been able to verify this, but we have found Bancker and June, Titus, Angevine & Co. in the Buffalo area at the same time. Bancker was one of the stockholders in the Institute, so we don’t understand why he should have been so treated. He does disappear at this time and we don’t even find his name again for six years.
We offer this aside because Stone apparently followed Bancker’s billing into Ontario. The story is that the local citizenry, seeing the advance notices of a large circus, were greeted on show day by Hoadley, Latham & Eldred’s little caravan, a situation they seemed to take in good humor.
What route we have found has them in Buffalo on July 4, Detroit on August 5 and Chicago on September 14. They had the honor of being the first circus to play Chicago. The lot was on Lake Street and admission was twenty-five cents. One source said they gave the performance in a canvas sidewall and this may be what was referred to as a tent at the time of the purchase in Albany. The word “tent” was not in common use in the circus business before 1850; “canvas” was the term in this instance and most advertising of the day referred to a tent as a “pavilion.” They stayed in Chicago several weeks; we know only that they left by November 1 as on that date the second circus to play the town, J. J. Hall’s Boston Arena Co., arrived and set up shop.
Hoadley, Latham, Eldred & Co. eventually reached Indianapolis and there their treasurer “sloped with the funds,” in the phrase of the time. This put an end to the season.
There are two petitions in the records for performances in Chicago by Hoadley, Latham & Eldred in 1837, but nothing to indicate that Stone was still with them. Admittedly, he is found nowhere else that year.
In December, 1837, he formed a partnership with a Vermonter named John Benchley which they called the Lafayette Circus. They began performing in Commerce, Missouri, on December 5, and spent the next year in Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee and Mississippi. This company was a bit more grand than Hoadley, Latham & Eldred. There were at least nine performers, none of the first rank. They ranged from Benchley’s three-year-old son, who did a contortionist act, to Peter Coty, an aged veteran of the ring who had first appeared in this country with Pepin & Breschard in 1814.
A diary kept by a musician with the Lafayette Circus tells of western trouping in those days. It is full of references to country stands, bad roads and having to build bridges. On one move, accomplished over two days, the personnel had to walk twenty-eight of the thirty miles between stands in order to lighten the wagons. There were blow-downs and fights and even one whole day without food.
The type of apprenticeship Stone was serving as a show-owner probably stood him in good stead in later years, but trouping in “new country” was certainly no one’s preference. They visited Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana in 1839. Stone left the company in that year and Benchley took the show into Mexico. He may well have been the first American showman to go there.
By 1841 Stone was a more-than-competent rider, having mastered both principal and scenic riding and performing them on barebacked horses. Scenic riding was popular from about 1830 until the Civil War. It was pantomime on horseback, the rider appearing in costume and acting out a vignette such as a sea voyage or a battle scene. Oscar Stone specialized in the most common of these acts, that of the “Indian Hunter” or some similar name. In Indian dress he would mime a redskin going through the parts of a hunt, dancing, stalking, killing and returning in triumph.
In 1841 Stone joined P. H. Nichol’s Grecian Arena and Classic Circus, his first affiliation with an eastern troupe. In 1842 he became a partner of Henry Rockwell, one of the better riders of the day, in Rockwell & Stone’s New York Circus. With this partnership Stone may be said to have joined the front rank of American showmen. They had a full complement of performers, a fourteen-piece band, a bandwagon, a seventy- five foot round top; in short, a complete show, capable of competing with any of its day. They had several successful seasons, played winter dates in New York and Boston, and by 1845 were large enough to put out two units. Oscar Stone managed one of these, Henry Rockwell the other. This system was used again in 1846.
On May 23, 1846, Oscar Stone’s unit played two performances in Raynham, Massachusetts. They had intended to play Taunton, according to a man who saw the show, but were denied a license. A very heavy thunderstorm struck after the evening performance, and Stone and two of his workmen caught bad colds in the process of taking the show down. Apparently, they developed pneumonia. The two canvasmen died shortly after in Taunton; Stone lingered three months, dying in Boston in August.
John Glenroy tells us that upon hearing of Stone’s death, Welch & Mann’s troupe draped their tent with crepe and the members of the company wore crepe on their left arms for a week.
Having begun his career by riding in a coal pit, Oscar Stone had risen to ownership of one of the more successful circus companies of his day. In 1844 Rockwell & Stone distributed an advertising booklet, from which we have taken some of the details we have reported here. We will close this short description of his life by quoting from it: “We have taken up Oscar R. Stone, a youth, dependent upon his exertions, possessed of a maddening ambition to acquire one certain position. Unaided he has attained it; and now he, with a modest gaze, looks nightly over the strained visages of the admiring and astonished crowds. We leave him, the husband, the father, the friend, the man, who has taught a lesson which should give recurrence to the motto ‘never despair.’”
Bibliography
Anon., Rockwell & Stone’s New York Circus (New York, 1844).
Joel Munsell, ed., Collections on the History of Albany (4 vols., Albany,
1865-71), vol. II, p.57.
Buffalo Daily Star (Buffalo, New York), 27 June 1836.
C. H. Burton, Extract from the proceedings of the Trustees of Detroit,
vol. II, p. 293.
American (Chicago, Illinois), 17 September 1836.
Thomas Bennett Diary, Harvard Theatre Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
New York Clipper, 28 December 1872.
John Glenroy, Ins and Outs of Circus Life (Boston: Wing & Co., 1885),
p.62, 63.
CHS webmaster J. Griffin, last modified December 2005.