The photo looking north on Lynch Street near the corner of Mary Lee Street in Plain Dealing shows an elephant ambling down the street, looking straight at camera, just as its rider does. Behind the giant pachyderm is the compact white-painted wooden Plain Dealing Methodist church. The peaceful scene in the photo makes it seem typical to see an elephant strolling down one of the main dirt roads of the Bossier Parish town near the Arkansas border. Another photo shows four horses pulling a highly decorated wagon/calliope down Mary Lee Street, with the picturesque Methodist church providing the simple background for the marvel of the calliope, a wagon-sized instrument that works by sending steam or compressed air through large whistles, like train whistles. Even small calliopes can project their sound for miles. On top of the calliope wagon sat live musicians, contributing to the sound and spectacle.
Few in town or the surrounding area would want to miss the circus show that this parade announced. It would have been the entertainment event of the year in this or any rural American community in the early 20th century. The distinctive gilded designs on the calliope wagon identifies this particular circus as the Mighty Haag Show, one of many American traveling shows that brought entertainment and sights and sounds of the world to small towns like Plain Dealing.
The Mighty Haag Show is northwest Louisiana’s circus that traveled the North American continent. Mighty Haag shows are listed in “Parkinson’s Directory of American Circuses from 1891-1938.” It was started by Ernest Haag (1866 - 1935) in 1891 in Louisiana as a wagon show, and became one of the best-known southern circuses and one of the largest traveling circuses in the United States.
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Like many of the great circus entrepreneurs of the time (including James Bailey of the Ringling brothers, Barnum and Bailey famous circus), Ernest Haag had a rags to riches story that circus promoters liked to showcase. He, as some stories say, ran away from home at age twelve, and had a sideshow in Shreveport in a tent he pitched on the fairgrounds. He moved up to a floating barge show on the Red River, and eventually a two-wheel cart drawn by three mules, then wagons. In 1909, the show began using the name, Mighty Haag Shows and upgraded to train travel. Hard times sent Haag back to using wagons in 1914. Returning to the use of wagons actually proved to be a good business decision in the fiercely competitive world of traveling shows in the early 20th century. The Oct 28, 1922 issue of the national entertainment periodical “Billboard,” noted,
“The Haag Shows are going to play Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin next season for the first time on wagons. It will be a two-ring show, carrying twenty cages and five elephants in the menagerie, two bands and a calliope. It will be one of the largest overland shows ever organized, and will put in the usual season of forty to fifty weeks. The days of the wagon shows are coming back…The shows have all grown so large that it is impossible for them to play the small towns or even towns of 5,000, and the showman with a twenty-wagon outfit can pick his territory and have practically no opposition. Ernest Haag has proven that a wagon show, even in the South in the summer, can make money.”
By 1929 Ernest Haag had replaced all wagons with trucks. Haag had ultimately specialized his touring show as a southern show, and projected the image that it was produced by “a southern gentleman.” In addition to his circus, he became a large property owner and for 18 years was the director of Shreveport’s Commercial National bank when it was the largest bank in Shreveport. Pine Wold Manor,
still standing on Fairfield Avenue in Shreveport is the stately, large brick former home of Ernest Haag and winter home of his circus. The grand home was begun in 1903 by lumberman T.M. Jones, remodeled to what it looks like today in 1919 by oilman J.P. Evans. It was used as the Mighty Haag Circus wintering grounds. An elephant, Trilby, is said to be buried on site.
Haag circus animals lived at Pine Wold in winter seasons or when not traveling, as well as at the fairgrounds in Shreveport, and private farmland in the area, including the Rushings’ farm in Princeton, Bossier Parish, where circus animals were fenced in like their cows, according to the childhood memories of a Princeton resident. Children growing up in Shreveport, especially in the vicinity of Pine Wold, remember when local children were urgently called upon to help find and catch an ‘escaped’ members of the menagerie, which was greeted with so much enthusiasm from the youngsters that there’s speculation the gates were opened on purpose as a publicity stunt. A clearly contrived ad in the “Shreveport Times” from March 27, 1913, exclaimed, “ESCAPED from the HAAG CIRCUS, PART OF THE MENAGERIE, A LARGE, STRIPED BENGAL TIGER.” In smaller letters it stated, “He has been captured and is now in captivity and serenely domiciled in the central show window of Dreyfuss’ (dry goods store).
In early 1935, at the age of 70, Ernest Haag passed away. His son and nephew took over and called the show Haag Brothers Circus. They kept it going only a few years, through 1938. One of its very last shows was in Plain Dealing. Visit the History Center, at 2206 Beckett St. in Bossier City or online at www.bossierlibrary.org to see the photos of the elephants, calliope and other parade attractions ambling down the streets of Plain Dealing in the Mighty Haag circus parade, or to read contemporary newspaper articles of 19th and 20th century circuses. Also visit the History Center on Thursday, June 23, 2022, at 6 p.m. to hear Dr. Gary Joiner, Professor of History at LSU-Shreveport present “The Secret Confederate Naval Base in Shreveport.” The Pages Past book club (open to all) will have a special Shark Week meeting on Monday, July 11, 2022 at 6 pm to discuss Michael Capuzzo’s book, “Close to Shore: The Terrifying Shark Attacks of 1916.” Call (318) 344-8040 for more information.
Article by: Pam Carlisle
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Great article
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