Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Circus Is Coming

The smell of cotton candy. The feel of sawdust beneath your feet. The whistle sounds. The overture plays. The performance begins.

That age-old routine will be repeated twice Thursday, November 5, when the 'Biggest Big Top on Earth' appears at the Hope Airport.

The circus is sponsored by Hope/Hempstead County Chamber of Commerce.

Carson and Barnes Five-Ring Circus, billed as "the largest show to visit here in over 60 years, in fact, the largest 'big top' show in America."

It is scheduled to present shows at 4:30 and 7:30 p.m.

This traditional big top circus has long held a reputation for outstanding animal acts including Nubian lions and Siberian tigers, basketball-playing Russian bears, camels, llamas, ponies, African and Asian elephants, and a center ring of beautiful liberty horses prancing under the direction of some of America's finest trainers.

Entitled 'Elegance of the Orient,' the 1998 show also features the world's largest indoor circus parade around the hippodrome track. It has five rings and sometimes seven acts perform simultaneously.

This season the show presents the only liberty horse act in the United States composed entirely of Friesian stallions. This rare breed of horses, marked by broad bodies with long flowing manes and tails, was common in the Netherlands prior to World War II. Hitler's troops destroyed nearly all of the horses during the war for fear they could be used by the resistance. The remaining few horses of this exquisite breed and their descendants who survived the war are slowly making a comeback.

Don't miss the double wheels of destiny and trapeze acts where daring young men and women will thrill you with amazing displays of physical prowess as they risk life and limb right before your eyes.

Have you ever seen a pygmy hippo, a zebu, zeony or a zee-donk? See an amazing collection of 100 exotic and domestic animals in the circus menagerie..