The Greatest Show on Earth started down the street.

On November 27, 1882, five brothers from Baraboo put on a show in Mazomanie. Not a circus. Not yet. Just a variety act with music and comedy, booked into Schmitz Hall a few blocks from where you are standing with your coffee.

They called it the Ringling Bros. Classic and Comic Concert Co. It was the first show they ever staged under their own name. That is the part worth sitting with. The Ringling Brothers, the name that would come to mean the circus in America, took their first bow right here in our little town.

Two years later they started an actual circus. Twenty-three years after that, in 1907, they bought Barnum & Bailey and became the kings of the tented show world. The Greatest Show on Earth. All of it traces back to one night in a hall in Mazomanie.

There is a plaque a short walk from the shop that tells the story. The Mazomanie Historical Society, the local paper (the wonderfully named News-Sickle-Arrow), and the Circus World Museum in Baraboo put it up in 1967. It is green and weathered and easy to walk past, which is exactly the kind of history we like around here. Big things starting small. Nobody in that hall in 1882 knew what they were watching.

We think about that more than you would guess. A coffee shop in an old bank is not the circus. But it is the same idea. You pick a spot, you do the work, you give people a reason to stop.

Next time you are in, ask us where the plaque is. Then go stand in front of it for a minute. You are closer to the start of the Greatest Show on Earth than most people who ever bought a ticket.

The 1855 crew

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