American Circus Corporation
American owner of circuses
The American Circus Corporation consisted of the Sells-Floto Circus, the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus, the John Robinson Circus, the Sparks Circus, and the Al G. Barnes Circus. It was owned by Jerry Mugivan, Bert Bowers and Ed Ballard. They sold the company in 1929 to John Nicholas Ringling for $1.7 million ($31.9 million today). With that acquisition, Ringling owned virtually every traveling circus in America.
Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus
The Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus was a circus that traveled across America in the early part of the 20th century. At its peak, it was the second-largest circus in America next to Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus. It was based in Peru, Indiana.
Al G. Barnes Circus
Al G. Barnes Circus was an American circus run by Alpheus George Barnes Stonehouse.
Sells Floto Circus
The Sells Floto Circus was a combination of the Floto Dog and Pony Show and the Sells Brothers Circus that toured with sideshow acts in the United States during the early 1900s.
John Robinson Circus
The John Robinson Circus was founded by John Robinson and Joseph Foster.
“American Circus Corporation” enters the record as american owner of circuses. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what American, Circus and Corporation can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4743398. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1929.
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This entry incorporates text from “American Circus Corporation” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.