by Paul R. Spitzzeri
The Homestead is working on plans for a program dealing with circuses, but it’s in the early stages, so more on that later. Meanwhile, last week, LAist ran a piece by Cato Hernández on the long-lost community of Barnes City on the west side of Los Angeles. So, this seemed like more than an opportune time, because the Homestead has artifacts in its collection related to Al. G. Barnes and his long-running animal circus, especially when it kept its winter headquarters in nearby Baldwin Park, to offer this post.
That neighboring city of more than 70,000 residents northwest of the Homestead was developed from a portion of the Rancho La Puente starting in March 1907, though it arose on part of what was the Vineland subdivision of some three decades before during the Boom of the 1880s. Vineland Avenue, which runs from Badillo Street, which extends east from Ramona Boulevard, south to Valley Boulevard through most of Baldwin Park, as well as portions of Bassett (this being the former ranch of Joseph M. Workman, son of Homestead founders William Workman and Nicolasa Urioste), is a remnant of that earlier project.
For about a decade from the late 1920s to the late 1930s, Baldwin Park, likes its western neighbor, El Monte, and its Gay’s Lion Farm, was likely only known to outsiders because it was the winter headquarters of The Al. G. Barnes Big 5 Ring Wild Animal Circus. Because of concerns about animal welfare, changing tastes and other reasons, circuses have largely fallen out of favor, but they were extremely popular during that period.
This post will look at some of the history of Barnes and his enterprise, including its years at Baldwin Park, and we’ll start by going through some of his early life and work leading up to the Twenties, which roared for a different reason with his circus. He was born in 1862 at Lobo, Ontario, Canada, west of London, as Alpheus George Stonehouse to Catherine Barnes and Thomas Stonehouse.
Thomas was a carpenter and builder and the family spent many years at Sault Ste. Marie, in the upper peninsula of Michigan at the furthest northern end of that state on the border with Canada and its city of the same name. In 1882, Thomas died while rescuing people in a shipwreck in Lake Superior and what his son did for more than a decade was not discovered for this post.
Some sources suggest he ran away from home, which may have happened just before his father died because George, as he was known, was with the family in the 1880 census. He apparently was a peddler when he saw the motion picture machine invented by Thomas Edison being shown. While it has been said he bought one of the devices and a phonograph and took them around on a horse-drawn vehicle for screenings, his first wife, Dollie, asserted in a divorce suit in 1913 that she fronted all but $100 of the price of the machines at the time they married in 1895 at the hot springs resort town of Glenwood Springs, Colorado.
Public records at Golden, just outside of Denver, however, show that the couple was married on 21 July 1900, so it seems that they lived together for at least five years. It was not until late 1903 that anything could be located regarding the couple’s animal circus, with Stonehouse rechristened as “Al. G. Barnes,” with the Trenton [New Jersey] Advertiser of 13 December reporting the vaudeville program at the Trent Theatre remarked that,
A feature will be the Barnes animal actors. Al. G. Barnes, one of America’s best known animal trainers, will give a high-grade performance, assisted by Mlle [Mme?] Barnes. These animal trainers have been featured by Barnum & Bailey for the past two years.
The act included a mountain lion named Nero, a quartet of white and spotted ponies, ten “clever, fast-working” dogs—these were Dollie’s first specialty—and four monkeys, of which Zip was asserted to be “the largest performing monkey in the world.”
The first located advertisement for the act was in the Wilmington [Delaware] Journal of 27 December 1904 in which “Al. G. Barnes’ Trained Animals” was on a bill at Dockstader’s Garrick Theatre. The following day’s edition of the paper commented that the matinee performance for the 29th was for children and it added that “Mr. Barnes will make his animal family go through every act in their repertoire” and “is interesting to young and old alike” with lions added to the dogs, monkeys and ponies mentioned above.
Barnes established a base in Kansas by 1905, with the Abilene Reflector of 8 April remarking that he executed a contract by which “to bring [the show] direct from Havana [Cuba] where they are now exhibiting one of the finest groups of trained animals in the world.” The account continued that the menagerie involved “the famous riding lion that gives an imitation of a circus rider,” “every known species of birds, gathered from forests of foreign kingdoms,” “the largest monkey in captivity, and “four black ponies presented to Mr. Barnes by the Czar of Russia.”
All of this, including the purported performances in Cuba are suspect, though it was added that Dollie, “the most daring lady animal trainer” had her own group of “wild beasts” called “The Happy Family” and including bears, boar hounds, lions, panthers, pumas and tigers. It certainly did appear that the growth of the enterprise meant an expanding sense of what was accurate in the Barnes universe, though this is hardly surprising or unusual for the circus world. By this point, the Barnes act was part of a show put on by Charles W. Parker, who is best known for his manufacturing of carousels, and they remained with him for about a half-decade.
The 8 June edition of the Reflector included the recording of a name for the act: the Zoological Eden and Jungle Circus. The paper noted that, as part of the Parker extravaganza,
The wild animal show and trained animal circus will be not the least of attractions on the pike. It is bigger and better than ever. Al. G. Barnes is manager with trainers, keepers and assistants. The Girl from Abilene looping the loop in a ball, the whirling Normans and other attractions will be seen.
When Barnes headed for Marshalltown, Iowa, north of Des Moines, the town’s Times-Republican of 26 June stated that “one of the new principal attractions of the New Parker Amusement Company will be Al. G. Barnes’ big animal show, which has just returned to this country after a two years’ tour of Cuba.” We know for sure that the act was not in that Caribbean nation for that long because of the aforementioned references.
Notably, the piece observed that “among the principal attractions of the animal show is the comical educated mule, Maud” because “she is the original of the life motion pictures which were taken at the Edison laboratory at Menlo park, New Jersey.” Purportedly, the animal and its movie were the inspiration for a popular cartoon strip “And Her Name Was Maud,” which the article mentioned as being known nationwide. Again, though, the association of the Barnes mule with Maud is suspect!
The show, though, kept growing, though there were always significant risks of injury to animals and people, with it being assumed that much of this did not appear in the media. A Louisiana newspaper in April 1906 cited a report from Corsicana, southeast of Dallas, that a lion named Czarina had an infected sore on her neck from being bitted by another lion, so that, when “Captain” Barnes (who knows from where the honorific derived?) attempted to lance the wound, she jumped on him, wounding his neck and ear. Barnes used a gun to beat the lion off him and effect his escape, but the question is, how often were animals mistreated in the circus?
In November 1906, Barnes put down stakes in Omaha where he opened “Al. G. Barnes’ Consolidated Trained Wild Animal Zoo, where the Gene Leahy Mall at The River Front just west of the Missouri River. An advertisement in the city’s Bee of the 15th noted that there were to be hourly performances of “All-Star Animal Acts” such as Dollie Castle “the dancing girl in the Lion Den, Romeo the talking horse, New the riding lion, and “Mme. Barnes and her wonderful performing PONIES, DOGS, MONKEYS, and GOATS.” Admission was ten cents and a child delivering the most admission tickets on the first of the new year was to be given a spotted pony named Beauty.
With a new moniker of the Al. G. Barnes Trained Wild Animal Circus, the proprietor took his show on the road in 1907 with theatre appearances with Ruth Grey (or Gray), who was said to be psychic and mind reader who had the tag line of “Nature’s Most Mystical Phenomenon.” The first located portrait of the proprietor, then in his mid-forties, was located in the Concordia [Kansas] Blade-Empire of 11 May, but two days prior to that Barnes, Dollie and his brother Jerry, who’d apparently recently joined the enterprise, were sued by Ethel James regarding a lion attack the prior year when she was a trainer and spent several weeks in the hospital. The matter, however, was later dismissed.
Further expansion and exposure for Barnes came in 1908, including a report in the Reflector of 3 March that,
Al. G. Barnes, recently of Abilene who was manager of the amusement companies controlled by C.W. Parker will be at the head of the A.G. Barnes Trained Animal shows during the season of 1908. The show is incorporated in Colorado with a capitalization of $50,000, Otto C. Floto being one of the stockholders. About forty animals will be carried by the show . . .
Barnes remained associated with Parker, while Floto was a sportswriter for the Denver Post, the owners of which, Harry Tammen and Frederick Bonfils, were the founders of what became the well-known Sells-Floto Circus. Perhaps Floto owned stock on behalf of his bosses, but the capitalization likely helped the Barnes enterprise become larger. A full-page photo feature in the Blade-Empire contained photos of Al and Dollie and eight views of animals and performers to promote a week of shows, sponsored by Parker, in Concordia.
Moreover, the Barnes circus began to take longer tours in destinations far from Kansas, including the Pacific Northwest and western Canada in the years from 1908 to 1910, while advertisements and promotional photographs more commonly appeared, as well. The 16 June 1909 issue of the Edmonton Bulletin in that Canadian metropolis featured Parker’s “Sunflower Special,” that being the state flower and nickname for Kansas, and observed,
The feature show, the one real big one, is the trained wild animal circus under the personal direction of Col. Al. G. Barnes, America’s oldest and representative animal educator, who personally owns the menagerie, every member of which is taught to perform . . . [and] show the training of a master mind. The feature act is the lion Nero, riding the horse Denver, directed by Millie [Dollie] Barnes. It stands alone in the amusement world.
It is also amusing to see Barnes referred to as an “animal educator” and one wonders, as well, how his honorific morphed from “Captain” to “Colonel,” but a remarkable feature in the 9 August 1910 edition of the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan clearly reveals how Barnes thought of himself beyond the entertainment embodied in the world of the circus.
Beginning with the expression of his “feelings of intermingled pride, satisfaction and gratification” for bringing his show to the city, Barnes also expressed “pride in the achievements of the past; satisfaction on account of the undoubted merit of the attractions fostered by my name, and gratification in which those attractions have grown upon the goodwill of the Canadian public.”
He did not wish to go into the elements of his enterprise but wanted instead to affirm that its success “is due very largely to the gratifying support accorded me by the more discriminating element among amusement lovers; the class that demands enlightenment while being entertained.” Then came his extraordinary statement about what sounded very much like a calling, rather than a vocation:
My own life has been devoted to the collection, maintenance, training, exhibition and sale of rare specimens of animal life from all parts of the world. I think I may say, without egotism or self-approbation, that my efforts have been attended with a fair meausure [sic] of success. Early in my career I formed the conclusion that there was a large and legitimate field for amusement organizations that aligned themselves squarely on the side of respectability and decency. During all the ensuing years I have had the courage of my convictions and not once have departed from the fixed policy of finding out what the public demanded in the way of amusement features and then meeting that demand by providing amusements that were clean, wholesome, and free from reprehensible features.
Given this, he concluded, he was pleased to be able to say that this way of operating led to cities inviting for a return and their denizens opening their arms to him and his show so that “on every hand my ears are greeted with the pleasing salutation: ‘Welcome to our city.'” During the remainder of 1910, Barnes and his circus toured western Canada and the West Coast of the United States, including, apparently for the first time, portions of California.
When the Barnes circus made its first appearances in greater Los Angeles, an offer was extended by Abbot Kinney, the founder of the seaside community known originally as “Venice of America,” for a substantial area for Barnes to use as a winter headquarters. With our balmy weather during a period when much of the country was mired in deep cold and show, it was small wonder that the circus impresario accepted and used the area around Venice and Culver City as his headquarters for more than fifteen years.
With that, we’ll return soon with part two and pick up the story there.