The Birmingham age-herald. [volume] (Birmingham, Ala.) 1902-1950, 1904-11-20
FAMOUS CIRCUS TO
END ITS CAREER
Forepaugh-SelIS BrotherSShow
to be Sold
is A GREAT ENTERPRISE
Is Housed in 60 Cars and Employs
300 People-Great Herd of Ele-
plants VIII Be Dispersed
BY Sale.
From the Washington Times.

! From the Washington Times.
| After thirty years of campaigning, some
of 1t stormy work and hard pulling, the
Forepaugh-S Brothers circus will end
its days within a few short weeks. A
we'll authenticated report comes from
| Columbus, o., where the show has It's
home and winters quarters, that the big
| circus will be taken to Brooklyn and sold
at auction on November 10.
1.-THE Forepaugh-Ses Brothers cneus
is no SLOUGH of a show says the
Brooklyn Eagle when it pulls into
a town in the gray dusk of an early
summer morning it is housed in sixty
cars, sleepers flats and box. 1t brings
with it some 800 people. of whom at least
400 are permanent employees of the circus.
and winter with it at Columbus. 1t has
a five-pole big-top and tive-pole mem
agerie-top, together with the necessary
smaller canvas although this is hardly
an Item, as the big first-class shows re-
new their canvas every spring. The ia
nous old lot at Halsey street and Sara
toga avenue has witnessed the undoing
of many and many a boss canvasman
each May Entrusted with the unlovely
Job of picking up the new canvas after
the weeks initial stand in Brooklyn,
Easy to Buy Elephant.
IF a man wanted an elephant bad,
or even half as badly as did that old
monarch, Wang. he would find plenty of
opportunity at this auction. The Fore
paugh-Sells Brothers aggregation has a
heard of twenty of these tellows-Tody
Hamilton would call them ponderous
pachyderms-and they are splendid lot.
hs.x- y in
the service of the double circus. Back
of the elephants is an unusually valuable
collection of smaller animals and a herd
of 800 horses of all sorts and conditions,
that are best adapted to circus uses.
Then there are tons and tons of circus
equipments, seat racks, and strngers,
a hundred wagons or more, the ranges
for the cook tent the anvils and the
FORCES for the blacksmiths, the har-
nesses the advertising cars, and the great
litter of stuff that a big show manages
TO collect a thirty-odd years of active
| life
IAN these are to be scattered, in hui
| man probability, to the four corners of
| the country There will be no joy in it
| for Lewis Sells or the men who have
| fought 1t out with him along the line so
| long a time What train of memories
1t will awake in the minds of each of
these
The First Per. ormance.
'The Sells brothers must think of that
spring day away back in ~, when they
drove the show out from Columbus
twenty miles TO Circleville and gave their
great moral exhibition for the very first
time. There were four of them in those
days-Ephraim, Allen, Lewis and Peter.
Allen Sells cad Horace Greeley's edito-
rails in the Tribune. left the show BUSH
ress and went out west to grow and wax
rich with the boom of Topeka. Kan.
Ephraim Sells stick to 1t until his death,
in 1896 The other two brothers have
not neglected it a moment in thirty-two
years. They changed over from wagon
show. that drove from town to town
in 1880. and tecame railroad show with
all that that signified twenty-four years
ago. That meant that they were grow
ing. and yeS what small proposition
they had then. compared with the big