Baraboo — Wisconsin | Shared Latitude

The town where the Ringling brothers started their circus empire, still home to a museum with a full lot of restored circus wagons and an ornate 1915 theater downtown. Lia hadn't been to a circus since she was six, and she still got wide-eyed walking the wagon barns.

Baraboo’s town square, a wide brick-paved circle around a bandstand, gives no immediate hint that this was the birthplace of the Ringling Bros. Circus, but drive a few blocks toward the Baraboo River and you find the old wintering grounds where the five Ringling brothers, sons of a local harness maker, launched their traveling show in 1884 before it eventually merged with Barnum & Bailey. Lia had grown up thinking of the circus as an abstract, faraway thing, and standing in the actual barns where the elephants and wagons once wintered made the whole enterprise feel suddenly specific and real.

Circus World and the wagon barns

Circus World, run by the Wisconsin Historical Society on the original Ringling winter quarters site, holds the largest collection of authentic circus wagons in the world — ornately carved, gilded parade wagons that once rolled through small-town Main Streets across America — housed in the same brick barns built by the brothers in the 1890s. We watched a live show under a small big top, then wandered the barns for an hour, Lia photographing the hand-painted wagon panels like she was documenting folk art, which, in a sense, she was.

A gilded, ornately carved antique circus parade wagon inside the barns at Circus World in Baraboo, Wisconsin

The Al. Ringling Theatre

Downtown, the Al. Ringling Theatre, built in 1915 by the eldest Ringling brother and modeled loosely on the Palace of Versailles and the Paris Opera, is a startlingly ornate movie palace to find in a town this size — gold leaf, a domed ceiling, red velvet seats — and it still screens films and hosts live shows today. We caught an evening screening there almost by accident and spent as much time looking up at the ceiling as at the movie itself.

Getting There

Dane County Regional Airport (MSN) in Madison is the nearest with commercial service, about 45 minutes southeast. A car is essential — Baraboo is a road-trip stop, not a fly-in town, and getting to nearby Devil’s Lake State Park requires one too.