The circus comes to town and starts a brawl
Pawnee Bill’s Cowboys start brawl
Pottstown residents of a century ago had many opportunities to see live entertainment.
Pottstown residents of a century ago had many opportunities to see live entertainment. The railroad brought an almost endless stream of touring companies, singers, comedians, magicians, actors, and actresses to perform at the Opera House or one of the smaller theaters.
In the summer, when the Opera House closed for the season, the railroad brought circuses of every size, with acrobats, trapeze artists, clowns, sword swallowers, fire eaters, and trained animal acts.
One warm day in mid-July 1897, the W.H. Harris World Famous Nickel Plate Circus came to town. An advance man no doubt arrived a few days before and plastered the town with posters. But there were no advertisements in the newspapers, and if everything had gone smoothly Harris and his entourage would Pottstown’s burgess from 1890-1892, Horace Custer stood in the middle of High Street and ordered the cowboys to disperse. Custer’s father Aaron also served a term as Pottstown’s burgess. They were the only father and son team to do so. Photo courtesy of the Pottstown Historical Society.
have left no record of their visit for a reader to ponder 112 years later.
Unfortunately, according to the Tuesday, July 20, issue of The Daily Pottstown Ledger, a teamster
with the Harris troupe had to leave town much faster than he planned. After the last performance, about 10 p.m. on Monday evening, the man, who had “charge of the big lion cage drove his fourhorse team out from under a tent and almost drove over a 10-year-old boy.” The child, a grandson of a school board member, was lying on the ground, and of course it was dark so the teamster didn’t see him.
“The crowd thought the
boy must have been badly injured and went for the driver with cries of ‘Lynch him.’” The teamster, who sincerely believed that to tarry would have been bad for his health, “whipped up his horses to escape” and even a “few warning shots from Detective O’Connor’s pistol failed to put him into the motion of pulling up.” As the scene unfolded, the panicked man driving a fourhorse team sped out of the circus grounds at Walnut and Washington streets
and galloped south on Washington with a howling mob in hot pursuit.
The driver somehow made the right-hand turn onto High Street and headed west with his horses at a full gallop. Lighted by the glimmer of a few arc lights, the team sped on, with the wagon clattering on the brick paving and the caged lions in back at full roar.
By then the teamster had left a “pursuing crowd of several hundred men”
far in the distance, but somewhere between Penn and Hanover streets, when the safety of the railroad station seemed assured, the front left wheel came off the careening wagon. The teamster bailed out and disappeared into the night.
The sturdily built wagon didn’t upset, releasing two agitated lions on High Street. The horses kept going, made the turn at Hanover Street, and dashed toward the railroad station where the thundering wagon and the roaring lions scattered a crowd of locals who had gathered to watch the circus board the train.
The story had a happy ending. Dr. Elmer Porter discovered the boy was “only slightly bruised.” The teamster escaped the mob. When its members learned that the boy wasn’t hurt, they concluded that “they might have been a little hasty with the driver.” The lions didn’t escape, and the missing wagon wheel was found in the gutter on High Street.
Wild West shows were another popular form of entertainment that came to town via the railroad. On May 25, 1900, the train carrying Pawnee Bill’s Wild West Show pulled into the station and quickly set up shop at the Pottstown Fairgrounds, which is now part of the shopping mall north of King Street and west of state Route 100. There, for several days, thousands of people came to see all the Indians, trick riders, bronco busters, fancy shooting and the rest of the acts that were part of a typical Wild West show.
Things went very smoothly until late Saturday night when the show men were loading their train at the Philadelphia and Reading station on South Hanover Street in preparation for a move to the show’s next stop in Pottsville. While they went about their business it was inevitable that some of the borough’s’ denizens, eager to rub elbows with the entertainers, were there.
At some point a “kindly disposed Pottstowner,” (according The Montgomery Ledger, offered “one of the cowboys” a drink from a bottle of whiskey. It must have hit the spot because it brought calls for “‘more rum”’ from several more of the show’s company. When “more rum” was not forthcoming the situation degenerated into a “melee” in which “Harry Fox, of South Evans Street, was struck several times on the head, and Jere(miah) Brumbach became the center of a crowd of show men.”
Seeing that Brumbach was in danger, Police Chief Humphreys, waded into the brawl and pulled him to temporary safety. However, when the cowboys pressed their attack, Humphreys, with Brumbach in tow, ran for the sanctuary of Borough Hall, going east along the railroad tracks and then north on Penn Street, “followed by a constantly growing mob of cowboys and show men.”
The whiskey-loving pursuers demonstrated excellent tactics by sending another group north on Hanover and then east on High Street in an effort to cut off their quarry. Their pursuit came to a jarring halt when “Special Officer Dumbolton” appeared on the scene, “drew his revolver (and) threatened to shoot if any man approached further.”
During the retreat of the police chief and Brumbach the combat at the railroad station continued and finally required six Pottstown policemen to separate the “battling mob and restore order about the crossing.” In what proved to be an anti-climactic ending to this affair, Pottstown Burgess Custer appeared at High and Penn streets and “warned the crowd there not to follow the officers to the station house” and with that admonishment the people dispersed.
Pottstown was founded along the Schuylkill River so it is natural that streams run through the borough, carrying water downhill into the river. As the town grew, the water courses were covered over and channeled underground into brick conduits. The process of covering the waterways was called arching the runs. There was no master plan for this project. Usually paid for by property owners it began in the mid-19th century and wasn’t totally completed until the 1950s.
In Pottstown’s earliest days there were only two streams flowing through town: one called Goose Run and the other, Tan Yard Run. Goose Run, which empties into Manatawny Creek between Walnut and Chestnut streets, comes through a part of town that was slow to develop and initially wasn’t a problem. However, the stream known as Tan Yard Run, began under what is now Pottstown’s high school and followed a course just east of Franklin Street until it reached King. There it went west under Griffith Towers, crossing High Street in the middle of the 200 block, and eventually reaching the Schuylkill near Hanover Street.
It is obvious from its name that at some point this stream passed through a tan yard. This point was located on the north side of High Street in the middle of the 200 block. Tanning leather was a very dirty and smelly process and the yard’s owner, without giving it another thought because that was how people used streams and rivers in those days, threw all the waste from the tanning process into the stream. So, at this point the stream became, as all streams eventually did, an open sewer laced with industrial and animal waste and the contents of the residents’ chamber pots.
Having a stream flow across the most important block of the town’s main street also created some problems for pedestrians. Getting around on foot in Pottstown’s early days was at best a dicey business because the town had no sidewalks. But navigating a stream made it even more challenging, and eventually this problem was solved by placing planks across the run on both sides of the street so that mud-spattered or dusty pedestrians had to cross the run by walking on a set of boards with no safety rails. There were no streetlights at the time, so this must have been a little more challenging after the sun went down.
Eventually Pottstown grew to the point where Goose Run became a problem. It was essentially an open sewer that polluted ground water, served as a breeding ground for mosquitos, and, in warm weather, created a stench so powerful that people living along its sections were sickened by it.
At least one portion of Goose Run was still open in 1930 when The Pottstown News reported on Sept. 11 that when “workmen started the work of arching 105 feet of Goose Run at a point north of the Pottstown Cemetery on Hanover Street” the stench was so bad that “some were almost overcome by the odors.” Pity the people that lived in that section who “had to keep their windows and doors closed to keep out all the loud odors.”
Believe it or not, a section of Hubley’s Run that ran parallel to South Washington Street before emptying into the Schuylkill River was still open in the 1950s and carrying raw sewage from homes that not been connected to the town’s sewage treatment plant. Eventually it was arched but not cleaned up 20 years later as an article in the Jan. 9, 1971, issue of The Pottstown Mercury reported that “raw sewage was discovered flowing into the Schuylkill at the end of South Washington Street.