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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Phineas T. Barnum Biography BARNUM, PHINEAS TAYLOR (1810-91). An American showman, born at Bethel, Conn. His father was a tavern keeper, and while attending the village school, Barnum traded with and played practical jokes upon his father's customers. At the age of 13 he was employed in a country store and at 18 went largely into the lottery business. When only 19, he married clandestinely and moved to Danbury, where he edited The Herald of Freedom and was imprisoned 60 days for a libel. In 1834 he removed to New York, where, hearing of Joyce Heth, alleged nurse of Washington, he bought her for $1000, and with the aid of forged documents and puffing exhibited her to considerable profit. Reduced again to poverty, he sold Bibles, exhibited negro dancers, and wrote for newspapers, until he bought the American Museum in New York, which he raised at once to prosperity by exhibiting a Japanese mermaid, made of a fish and a monkey, also a white negress, a woolly horse, and finally a noted dwarf, styled "General Tom Thumb," whom he exhibited also in Europe in 1844. In 1847 he offered Jenny Lind $1000 a night for 150 nights. The tickets were sold at auction, a single ticket bringing in one case as much as $650; and his gross receipts for 95 concerts were over $700,000. He built a villa at Bridgeport, in imitation of the Brighton Pavilion, and engaged in various speculations, one of which, a clock factory, made him bankrupt. Settling with his creditors in 1857, he engaged anew in his career of audacious enterprises and made another fortune. Two of his museums having been destroyed by fire, in 1865 and 1868, he established in 1871 his "Greatest Show on Earth," a traveling circus and menagerie, with many new features. He was an unsuccessful candidate for Congress in 1866, but was four times elected to the Connecticut Legislature. His Autobiography (1854, since greatly enlarged) has at least the merit of frankness. In 1865 he published The Humbugs of the World, and in 1869 Struggles and Triumphs. The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. II (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 696. |