Saturday, February 09, 2008

19th Century Tents #6


Barnum baby ele & clown int view-BW, originally uploaded by bucklesw1.

P.T. Barnum Show- baby elephant and clown interior view

Posted by Buckles at 2/09/2008 06:01:00 AM

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

While I would guess that the Barnum tents of the 1910s were the largest used by a circus (Harold Barnes said that some revival tents were the largest he had ever seen), the Barnum show of the mid-1880s claimed in their route books of having a big top that was 252 x 488 feet. More reasonable was the 216 x 377 given in their 1883 route book. Perhaps the 252-foot size added the stake line and the actual tent was still the same. Here is a fascinating and rare interior view of the Barnum tent from about 1894 or, possibly, a decade earlier. Note, among else, the two pairs of straight uprights for a trapeze act among the angled quarter poles.
Dick Flint
Baltimore

09 February, 2008 11:05
Buckles said...

Years ago when we were with Kelly-Miller I saw a revival tent near one of our lots that was huge.
Don't know the dimensions or the number of sinners it could accommodate but I recall three rows of quarter poles.

09 February, 2008 11:26
Anonymous said...

Tent dimensions vary all over the map and they actually do change from fabrication, to being wet, to drying out, to being stretched through the season. There's also a difference from fabrication shape/dimensions to the "projected" coverage when the tent is in the air.

RBBB had a 190/200-foot round with five 60-foot middles in 1919-1938 and again 1946-1947, making it 190/200 by 490/500. The 190 x 490 size yields about 85,352 square feet of coverage. Bear in mind that the all-time single tent performance attendance record was set under this tent in 1924 at Concordia, Kansas, some 16,000+. Note that this tent came five years after the Chandler text.

You'd be hard pressed to find larger coverage, whether the hippodrome show tents of the 1850s and 1870s, or any revival outfit.

Whalen portrayed an 1892 B&B tent as a 220 with five 56's, but I believe the round included the stake line. It also wasn't always erected as a six-pole top.

The 1884-1889 B&B top, alleged to be a 252 round with four 55 middles, was clarified by the manufacturer to be only a 212 x 432. It calculates out to 81,938 square feet, smaller than RBBB.

Any tent round over 200-feet in diameter was truly exceptional. I'd question whether it included stake-line dimensions.

10 February, 2008 19:20
Anonymous said...

I believe in the 1950's Oral Roberts boasted of "the biggest revival tent ever." He claimed seats for 18,000.

10 February, 2008 21:08
Anonymous said...

Fill in the RBBB hippodrome track, rings and stages with seating and you could probably have seated 30,000 in it. Roberts may indeed have had had the largest revival tent, but it was still a far cry from the biggest big top.

11 February, 2008 11:29

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