BARNUM, Phineas Taylor,
exhibitor, born in Bethel, Connecticut, 5 July 1810. His father was an innkeeper
and country merchant, who died in 1825, leaving no property, and from the age of
thirteen to eighteen the son was in business in various places, part of the time
in Brooklyn and New York city. Having accumulated a little money, he returned to
Bethel and opened a small store. Here he was very successful, especially after
taking the agency for a year of a lottery chartered by the state for building
the Groton Monument, opposite New London. When the lottery charter expired, he
built a larger store in Bethel, but through bad debts the enterprise proved a
failure. After his marriage in 1829 he established and edited a weekly newspaper
entitled "The Herald of Freedora," and for the free expression
of his opinions he was imprisoned sixty days for libel.
In 1834 he removed to New York, his property having become much reduced.
He soon afterward visited Philadelphia, and saw there oil exhibition a colored
slave woman named Joyce Heth, advertised as the nurse of George
Washington, one hundred and sixty-one years old. Her owner exhibited an
ancient-looking, time-colored bill of sale, dated 1727. Mr. Barnum bought her
for $1,000, advertised her extensively, and his receipts soon reached $1,500 a
week. Within a year Joyce Heth died, and a post-mortem examination proved that
the Virginia planter had added about eighty years to her age. Having thus
acquired a taste for the show business, Mr. Barnum traveled through the south
with small shows, which were generally unsuccessful. In 1841, although without a
dollar of his own, he purchased Scudder's American Museum, named it Barnum's
Museum, and, by adding novel curiosities and advertising freely, he was able to
pay for it the first year, and in 1848 he had added to it two other extensive
collections, besides several minor ones.
In 1842 he first heard of Charles S. Stratton, of Bridgeport, Connecticut,
then less than two feet high and weighing only sixteen pounds, who soon became
known to the world, under Mr. Barnum's direction, as General Tom Thumb, and was
exhibited in the United States and Europe with great success. In 1849 Mr.
Barnum, after long negotiations, engaged Jenny Lind to sing in America for 150
nights at $1,000 a night, and a concert company was formed to support her. Only
ninety-five concerts were given ; but the gross receipts of the tour in nine
months of 1850 and 1851 were $712,161, upon which Mr. Barnum made a large
profit. In 1855, after being connected with many enterprises besides those
named, he retired to an oriental villa in Bridgeport, which he had built in
1846o He expended large sums in improving that City, built up the city of East
Bridgeport, made miles of streets, and therein planted thousands of trees. He
encouraged manufacturers to remove to his new City, which has since been united
with Bridgeport. But in 1856-'7, to encourage a large manufacturing company to
remove there, he became so impressed with confidence in their wealth and certain
success that he endorsed their notes for nearly $1,000,000. The company went
into bankruptcy, wiping out Mr. Barnum's property; but he had settled a fortune
upon his wife.
He went to England again with Tom Thumb, and lectured with success in
London and other English cities, returning in 1857. His earnings and his wife's
assistance enabled him to emerge from his financial misfortunes, and he once
more took charge of the old museum on the corner of Broadway and Ann street, and
conducted it with success till it was burned on 13 July 1865. Another museum
which he opened was also burned. He then, in the spring of 1871, established a
great traveling museum and menagerie, introducing rare equestrian and athletic
performances, which, after the addition of a representation of the ancient Roman
hippodrome races, the great elephant Jumbo, and other novelties, he called "P.
T. Barnum's Greatest Show on Earth."
Mr. Barnum has been four times a member of the Connecticut legislature,
and mayor of Bridgeport, to which city he presented a public park. His other
benefactions have been large and numerous, among them a stone museum building
presented to Tufts College near Boston, Massachusetts, filled with specimens of
natural history. He delivered hundreds of lectures on temperance and the
practical affairs of life. He has published his autobiography (New York, 1855;
enlarged ed., Hartford, 1869, with yearly appendices), "Humbugs of the
World" (New York, 1865); and "Lion Jack," a story (1876).