Circus World Museum

In the 1880s several brothers of the Ringling family, sons of a local harness maker, launched a small traveling show out of Baraboo. Through relentless hard work, showmanship, and shrewd business sense, they grew it year by year into one of the greatest circuses in the world, eventually absorbing their rivals and becoming, with the merger that created Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey, the self-styled Greatest Show on Earth.

Through those growing years, Baraboo remained the circus's winter home. Each autumn the trains rolled back into town, and the animals, wagons, and workers settled in for the cold months in a sprawling complex of barns and shops along the river, where crews repaired equipment, trained animals, and rehearsed. The town of Baraboo lived and breathed the circus, and several of those original winter-quarters buildings still stand on the museum grounds today.

The heart of the museum is its collection of antique circus wagons, the largest anywhere, and they are astonishing. In the great parades that once heralded a circus coming to town, these wagons rolled through the streets, elaborately carved with figures, gilded, painted, and glittering, some carrying calliopes or cages of animals. Preserved and restored, they gleam again in the museum's halls, a lost art of the wheelwright and the woodcarver.

Alongside the wagons, the museum holds posters, costumes, props, and artifacts tracing the whole sweep of American circus history, from sideshow to center ring. Together they tell the story of an entertainment that once traveled to nearly every town in the country, a spectacle that shaped American popular culture in the days before film and television took its place.

Circus World is not only a collection of objects, it is a living museum. In the warm months a big top rises on the grounds, and live performers, aerialists, jugglers, clowns, and animal acts carry on the traditions of the circus arts before an audience. Demonstrations show how wagons were built and how the great shows were staged, keeping the skills and spirit of the circus alive.

This blend of museum and performance is what sets the place apart. Visitors do not just read about the circus, they watch it, hear the calliope, and feel the atmosphere of a form of entertainment that once defined summer for towns across America. For families especially, the shows turn a history lesson into an afternoon of genuine spectacle.

Baraboo itself is a handsome county seat with a classic town square, and its identity is bound up with the circus that made it famous. The country around it is the Baraboo Range, a set of very old quartzite hills, and just to the south lies Devils Lake State Park, with its towering bluffs and deep lake, one of Wisconsin's most beloved parks.

A visit to Circus World fits easily into a wider tour of the area, whether paired with the bluffs of Devils Lake, the crane conservation work of the nearby International Crane Foundation, or the water parks and river gorge of Wisconsin Dells a short drive north. This corner of south central Wisconsin packs a remarkable range of attractions into a small radius, with the circus town of Baraboo at its heart.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.