From John Goodall

4f9722c814103_preview-300, a photo by bucklesw1 on Flickr. RACINE — For more than 100 years, a once-famous elephant trainer — who was fatally gored by a pachyderm that went berserk — rested in an unmarked grave at Mound Cemetery in Racine. No one visited anymore. No flowers adorned his grave. Not a shred of evidence showed that this patch of earth covered the burial site of renowned elephant trainer Joe Anderson. “Did anyone ever miss him? To the best of my knowledge, no one ever came to visit him and that was so sad,” said Lauren Klein, who represents the High Riders Motorcycle Club, 1328 Washington Ave., on the Uptown Improvement Organization. “It had been over 100 years. Everybody forgot him.” But 113 years after the Great Wallace Circus Show came to present-day Racine, when Anderson was gored by an elephant in his charge and died on June 3, 1898, his grave has a headstone. And members of the motorcycle club plan to host a memorial ride in two weeks to pay tribute to the once-forgotten Anderson. “It just struck a chord with me, and I thought that perhaps we could do something special,” Klein said. “It’s just something that needed to be done.” According to historical accounts, the Great Wallace Circus Show stopped in Columbia Corners every summer and June of 1898 started out no different. The Uptown neighborhood spans what used to be Columbia Corners. The 40-car train pulled up and was unloaded so the circus could be set up on about 10 acres of open land to the north of 18th Street. Anderson was herding the elephants to water when the lead elephant, named Prince, went on a rampage. The elephant gored Anderson — as people watched helplessly — before running wild through the area. Prince was said to have chased police, tipped wagons and a load of hay, hurled a bicycle through a fence and torn down circus tents. “The show still went on,” Klein said. “It happened about 7:30 a.m. and the show went on as planned at 2:30 p.m.” But no elephants were in that show, according to historical accounts. Prince was captured when circus workers snagged him in a rope snare. These workers cut off Prince’s tusks. Klein said apparently Prince left with the circus train two days later, but Prince died of blood poisoning 10 days after the rampage. “I’d like to find the elephant,” Klein said, adding she doesn’t know if, and where, Prince may have been buried. A message was left for Peter Shrake, an archivist with the Circus World Museum, about the incident and what may have become of the pachyderm, but he wasn’t available for comment. “It was kind of a tragedy,” Cemetery Supervisor Steve Bedard said. “Lauren and her High Rider friends did an awesome job.” After Klein asked cemetery staff to pull Anderson’s original burial card, she said she found his grave at Mound Cemetery. The High Riders paid for Anderson to finally receive a headstone, to the tune of about $700, Klein said. Bedard said not only does he have Anderson’s original burial card, but those for everyone interred since 1850 at the cemetery. The Great Wallace Circus Show later became the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus. For more than three decades, the circus continued to set up tent in Racine and circus performers would travel to Anderson’s grave and lay flowers in memory of him, according to historical accounts.