Andrea Stulman Dennett - Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America

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The Dime Museum in America

ANDREA STULMAN DENNETT

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London

1997 by New York University
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dennett, Andrea Stulman, 1958
Weird and Wonderful: the dime museum in America / Andrea Stulman Dennett.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8147-1855-X (clothbound : alk. paper).ISBN 0-8147-1886-8 (paperbound : alk. paper)
1. MuseumsUnited StatesHistory. 2. Dime museumsUnited StatesHistory.
3. Curiosities and wondersMuseumsUnited StatesHistory. 4. Eccentrics and
eccentricityMuseumsUnited StatesHistory. 5. Popular cultureUnited States
History. 6. Barnum, P. T. (Phineas Taylor), 1810-1891. 7. Barnums American
Museum. I. Title.
AM11.D46 1997
069.0973dc21 97-4880
CIP

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.

Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

The dime museum has been nearly forgotten, but during its heyday in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was as popular an institution in the United States as the movies are today. Phineas Taylor Barnum made the dime museum a fixture of the American cultural landscape. Although he is famous for his circus career, he did not become involved with the circus until 1870, at the age of sixty. By that time he had made and lost several fortunes and was famous on two continents. Audiences loved Barnums brand of amusement, and his museum in New York had made him rich years before he brought Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, to America in 1850, and decades before he entered into the famous partnership with James Bailey. In fact, it was through his American Museum in New York that Barnum earned his reputation as the father of American show business. His museum was the prototypeall later museums followed his pattern.

Weird and Wonderful chronicles the evolution of the dime museum from its inception as a cabinet of curiosities to its demise as a victim of competition from newer amusements. Although I devote an entire chapter to Barnum, I concentrate mainly on his museum activities, from 1841 to 1868, and have left accounts of his personal, political, and circus life to his biographers.

The dime museum was a unique institution. It integrated many types of entertainment under one roof and for a single price. In addition, it was a safe environment for women and children and was open from early morning to late at night. Dime museums flourished until the turn of the century, but by World War I there were hardly any left in America.

There were dime museums throughout the United States, but most of the earlier and more important ones were concentrated on the eastern seaboard and in the Midwest. I am reluctant to say outright that the dime museum was an East Coast/Midwest phenomenonthere was, for example, the Pacific Museum of Anatomy and Natural Science, which can be dated as early as 1869but resources are scarce. It is clear, however, that the dime museum concept began and flourished in the Northeast and that the existence of the museum circuit was one of the reasons there was a high concentration of museums in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Museum managers were constantly seeking new exhibits; after all, variation was what made patrons return again and again to the same museum. Consequently, freaks, magicians, and other variety artists shuttled back and forth between museums, hardly ever staying at one institution longer than six weeks.

After establishing profitable museums in the East, many managers sought to create additional museums in the Midwest. George Middleton, who operated the Globe Dime Museum in New York, ventured west and created his own museum circuit. The tremendous success of the New York Eden Muse led to similar museums in Boston and Chicago. Southern cities like Richmond, Norfolk, and Atlanta, however, were out of the main dime museum loop. Although they may have cultivated the same types of itinerant amusements as Baltimore and Philadelphia, these cities were smaller. And since they were part of a slave-oriented culture, they did not have the thriving working-class population needed to support the dime museum industry. The early dime museums prospered in industrialized urban cities where it was acceptable and theoretically profitable to have an entertainment environment that catered to all classes.

As a result, the dime museum material that I have detailed comes largely from the industrialized eastern seaboard cities and the Midwest. As with most ephemeral amusements of this period, documentation is sparse. For example, the name of a dime museum might be mentioned in a nineteenth-century newspaper, but when I went to do research on the institution, there were no documents. No archive has a file labeled Dime Museum. Much of the information I found was in the theater section of file catalogs and newspapers, and most references were to the big museums, those with reputable theaters. Many of my examples are of New York City institutions, since they were widely imitated, and because New York was home to many types of museums. I tried to include detailed descriptions of a variety of museums in order to give the reader an exact idea of what they looked like and felt like; included in this project are descriptions of both the elite and the smaller, more colorful institutions. Luck had a lot to do with this research, and many times I found dime museum programs in files tided Waxworks, Freaks, or Circus. The museums discussed are generally ones that were popular with nineteenth-century patrons. As a result, their popularity or their longevity left us a legacy, however scattered.

Competition was fierce among the big city museums, and managers had to advertise their exhibits prominently in the newspapers. Although this sort of documentation was valuable, it is difficult to tell what is fact and what is fiction when one is dealing with propaganda. Museum managers routinely lied to the public in order to make their exhibits sound more exciting. In addition, many of the articles I discovered on dime museum attractions were undated, which leads to confusion about what was taking place at any given time. I have done my best to sift through many strange sources of information and piece together in a logical way some descriptions of these museums. Throughout my research I found numerous contradictions in both primary and secondary sources; all discrepancies have been mentioned in the notes. Often I was disappointed by the lack of primary materials and found gathering information a difficult struggle. At length, however, the project began to come into focus. The end result is, I hope, a clear presentation of what a dime museum was, how important it was to nineteenth-century Americans, and how this institution, which lasted little more than half a century, affected the twentieth-century amusement industry. Because of the ephemeral nature of the dime museum, however, there will always remain questions that cannot be answered.