There is a particular quality to the air in a museum that holds old circus things. It is not quite the same as any other kind of museum air — not the hushed reverence of fine art galleries, not the cool sterility of natural history. It is something closer to the feeling you get standing in an old theater before anyone else arrives: the sense that the space remembers what it has held, and is not entirely done with it.
I love museums. Always have. There is something about standing near an object that has passed through the hands of history — not a replica, not a photograph, but the actual thing — that does something a book cannot quite do. It makes the past present in a way that is almost physical. When I write about the museum at the heart of my Last Ringmaster series, with its archival mounts and amber lighting and cases full of objects that are not quite what they appear, I am writing from a place of genuine love for what those spaces can hold.
In Freak, the fourth book in the series, Harley’s museum becomes a place of revelation. Objects that have sat catalogued and undisturbed for decades turn out to carry older histories than their labels suggest. A braided cord that looks decorative turns out to be an inventory system for a kind of trade nobody named out loud. A mirror in storage reflects the room slightly wrong. The artifacts of the sideshow world, it turns out, are not always what they appear to be — and real circus museums carry exactly that same quality of hidden depth.
Here are some of the real artifacts and collections that inspired me, and the museums where you can find them.
The Artifacts That Stay With You
The Parade Wagons
Before a circus ever raised its tent, it announced itself with a parade. Elaborately carved and painted wagons — some the size of small houses, drawn by teams of horses — rolled through the streets of every town on the route, and the parade was free. It was advertising and spectacle combined, and the wagons themselves were works of art: gilded, mirrored, painted with scenes of exotic animals and mythological figures, and sometimes carrying live performers or a calliope thundering music down Main Street.
These wagons are among the most visually overwhelming artifacts in circus history, and some of the best-preserved collections are in Florida and Wisconsin. The Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin, holds the largest collection of restored historic circus wagons on earth — built on the original Ringling Bros. winter quarters site where many of these wagons were constructed and painted in the first place. The Ringling Museum in Sarasota, FL holds a stunning selection as well, and the Showmen’s Museum in Riverview, FL has brightly colored parade wagons that were donated by the carnival community itself, many by the working carnies and retired performers who settled in the Gibsonton area nearby.
Standing next to one of these wagons is the closest thing I know to understanding why a circus coming to town was, for many small American communities, the single most extraordinary event of the entire year.
The Howard Bros. Circus Model
I have to mention this one because it is unlike anything else in any museum I have ever visited. Howard C. Tibbles spent fifty years building a scale model of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus at its 1930s peak — a 44,000-piece miniature world housed at the Ringling’s Tibbals Learning Center in Sarasota. Every tent, every wagon, every performer, every animal, every rigging crew member, every cookhouse tent. It covers nearly 3,800 square feet and contains more detail than you can absorb in a single visit.
What strikes me about it is not the scale but the completeness. It captures the circus not as spectacle but as a world — the hidden city that traveled under canvas and was assembled and disassembled in a single night. When I write about Harley’s troupe as a found family, as a community that carries its own rules and history and structure, the image I return to is something like this model: all the moving parts that make the whole thing possible, most of them invisible to the audience that came to be amazed.
The Sideshow Banners
Sideshow banners are, I think, the most purely arresting artifacts of the circus world. They are ten feet tall, hand-painted in screaming color, and they were designed for a single purpose: to stop you in your tracks from twenty feet away and make you absolutely certain that what was inside that tent was worth the price of admission.
The Showmen’s Museum in Riverview has original hand-painted sideshow banners in its collection — the real painted canvas, not reproductions. The Coney Island Museum in Brooklyn, tucked above the last permanently housed circus sideshow in America, keeps a collection of banners and ephemera that put you directly in contact with the visual language of the midway. There is a specific grammar to sideshow banner art — the exaggeration, the bright backgrounds, the performer posed in a way that emphasizes exactly the thing you are about to pay to see — and standing in front of an original is a genuinely different experience from looking at a photograph of one.
In Freak, Harley’s museum has sideshow entertainer portraits on the south wall — the kind of images that record a performer not as oddity but as professional, posed with the pride of someone who knows their own worth. The banners are the public face of that same history, and they tell it in a much louder voice.
The Calliope
A calliope is a steam-powered pipe organ, built to be heard from miles away, and it traveled with circuses to announce their arrival before anyone could see them. The sound is enormous, slightly unhinged, and entirely unforgettable — something between a church organ and a factory whistle, making music that carries across the flat plains of the Midwest with the urgency of a telegram.
The Showmen’s Museum in Riverview has a beautifully restored calliope in their collection. Hearing it play — and they do play it — connects you to an era when the circus’s advance notice was not a billboard or a social media post but a sound that arrived on the wind, and a whole town would stop what it was doing and listen. I find this genuinely moving in a way I did not expect the first time I encountered one. There is something about a sound designed to carry that much joy across that much distance that hits differently in person.
The Escape Apparatus
In Freak, one of the scenes at the museum after-party has Chutes — Harley’s escape artist — holding court near the old escape apparatus in the collection, patiently explaining lock mechanisms to a cluster of fascinated guests. This is the kind of artifact I love most: an object that carries its skill inside it. A straitjacket, a water torture cell, a set of restraints designed to be impossible and then escaped from — these are objects that require an expert to read, and that read completely differently once you understand what they are asking of a human body.
Circus World in Baraboo has exhibits on sideshow attractions including restraint and escape acts. The Showmen’s Museum’s collection of props, equipment, and performance artifacts includes items from the working lives of performers whose skill and craft were every bit as demanding as any other performing art. The difference is that the circus made it look like danger, because danger was what people paid to see.
John Ringling’s Private Railcar
The Ringling Museum in Sarasota has John Ringling’s fully restored private railcar — the actual car he traveled in, with its original interior intact. This is an artifact that quietly makes an argument about power. The circus moved by rail, and the railcar at the front of the train was where the money lived. Every performer, every animal, every ton of equipment, every tent pole and rigging wire was somewhere back in the long string of cars behind it.
I think about this often when I write Silas, the Curator in Freak, who has spent centuries traveling with and just ahead of the spectacle he curates. There is always a version of someone who is not quite in the show but not quite of the civilian world either — who moves in the space between the front of the train and the back of the tent. John Ringling’s railcar is a beautiful artifact. It is also a statement about distance.
The 1903 Ferris Wheel
This one is at the Showmen’s Museum in Riverview, and I mention it because it is the kind of thing that makes you stop and simply stare. A fully restored 1903 Conderman Ferris wheel — one of the nation’s earliest — rebuilt and returned to working condition inside the museum. You can stand next to a working Ferris wheel built when Theodore Roosevelt was President. That sentence should not be possible, and yet there it is, turning.
Old magic disguised as old machinery. I know a thing or two about that.
Where to Go: A Circus Museum Guide
The John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art — Sarasota, Florida
My favorite, and one of the great under-visited museum complexes in the country. Sixty-six acres on Sarasota Bay, with a dedicated Circus Museum founded in 1948, the Tibbals Learning Center housing the Howard Bros. Circus Model, a world-class art collection, and the Ringlings’ palatial Venetian Gothic mansion, Ca’ d’Zan. Plan at least half a day. The Circus Museum alone will take longer than you expect. ringling.org
International Independent Showmen’s Museum — Riverview, Florida
Just south of Tampa, on the edge of Gibsonton — a town with its own deep carnival history, where working carnies have wintered for decades and retired performers built their communities. Over 54,000 square feet of American carnival and circus history, donated in large part by the community itself. Original sideshow banners, a working 1903 Ferris wheel, a restored 1950 carousel, calliope, parade wagons, and acres of show vehicles. Open Thursday through Sunday. showmensmuseum.org
Circus World — Baraboo, Wisconsin
The original winter headquarters of the Ringling Bros. Circus, now a National Historic Landmark and the site of the world’s largest collection of restored circus wagons. Live summer circus performances. Exhibits on sideshow history, circus trains, animal trainers, and the logistics that made the traveling show possible. A pilgrimage destination for anyone serious about circus history. circusworld.wisconsinhistory.org
The Coney Island Museum and Sideshows by the Seashore — Brooklyn, New York
The last permanently housed circus sideshow in the United States, still running live performances seasonally. The museum above the theater holds artifacts and ephemera from Coney Island’s long history as the original amusement destination — vintage signage, historical photographs, fun house mirrors, and a collection that puts you directly in the lineage of the sideshow tradition. Open seasonally. coneyisland.com
Why This Matters to the Series
When I placed Harley’s museum at the center of the Last Ringmaster world, I was doing something I do instinctively as a writer: I was making the history physical. Objects carry stories in a way that records cannot always reach. They have been touched, used, worn, escaped from, ridden, played, and performed in front of crowds that are now gone. They are the evidence that the thing was real.
The artifacts in Harley’s collection are fictional, but they are drawn from a genuine tradition — from the real objects that real circus and sideshow people left behind, catalogued and cared for in museums that deserve more visitors than they get. The braided cord that turns out to be an inventory system. The mirror that reflects slightly wrong. These invented objects sit in the same tradition as the real ones: they look like one thing and turn out to be another, and the only way to know the difference is to pay attention.
That, I think, is what museums are for. And what good stories are for, too.
