The parading pachyderms of St. Paul Street
Imagine how astounding it would have been in the 1800s to have seen a live elephant downtown
Photographer Edwin Poole was in for a surprise when he peered out the window of his studio one day. Looking down from the third floor of a building on St. Paul Street at the corner of Ontario Street, the scene he saw below was a little unusual.
A circus parade was making its way down the main street of St. Catharines, a parade extending a couple of blocks, back to Queen Street and beyond, and led by seven or eight elephants.
Realizing it was not every day you see elephants walking down St. Paul Street, photographer Poole grabbed his camera, pointed it out his window, and took the shot that is today’s old photo.
The photo comes to us with no documentation attached — nothing to tell us when it was taken or which travelling circus was wending its way through town on that day. All that we know with certainty is that it was taken by photographer Poole, and from that we can deduce that the photo was taken sometime during the last quarter of the 19th century — Poole established his photo business here in 1877 and had his photo studio at the St. Paul and Ontario corner from then until he moved elsewhere on St. Paul in 1900.
In the 19th century and well into the 20th century, visits to St. Catharines by travelling circuses were annual events, and there was no better way for the circus to advertise its presence than to stage a parade like this through the centre of town. Can you imagine how astounding it would have been back in the 1800s to have seen a live elephant — the stuff of picture books, of the tales of intrepid adventurers in far away lands — lumbering along down the main street of your hometown?
Earlier in this series we have talked about photos of earlier occasions like this — one with elephants lumbering down Geneva Street in June 1953, another showing them passing the old courthouse at the corner of James and King streets in July 1976.
Research reveals that such circus parades continued at least until 1984, when the Shrine Circus staged an elephant washing in Montebello Park and then paraded the pachyderms down Queen Street and along St. Paul to Carlisle Street.
Circuses were once so popular that city council decreed in 1977 that no more than one circus a month could use municipal arenas.
But times have changed in the past few decades. With the growth of the animal rights movement, circuses have became less and less welcome across the continent as they came under greater scrutiny for mistreatment to their animal performers. A great symbolic turning point came with the disbanding of the historic Ringling Bros. Circus in 2017, after it could not make a go of it after it removed elephants from its shows.
Here in St. Catharines, city council decreed in June 2019 that no circus featuring animal acts could henceforth perform on any city property. The era of elephants walking our downtown streets has definitely ended.