From its earliest days, Skaneateles has been no stranger to elephants. Nathaniel Miller, who came here in 1807, described the village as it was upon his arrival and recalled this of tavern keeper Elnathan Andrews:
“Andrews had a travelers’ barn on the lake-shore… An elephant, the first one ever seen in this part of the State, was housed in this barn.”
I don’t know who owned the elephant, why it was in the barn, or how long it stayed there. For now, it is one of life’s mysteries. But William Beauchamp shared a more detailed story from his childhood:
“June 19, 1837, I first went to a menagerie—a caravan as it was commonly called. It did not come every year, and thus called out a reported crowd of 3,000 people… The elephant carried a band of girls around, my sister [Mary Elizabeth] among them; then his keeper sprang upon his tusks and was swayed up and down around the ring, and having seen nothing more wonderful we were greatly pleased.”
In June of 1842, another caravan passed through the village with an elephant. A local boy, Henry Hall, was “amusing himself” and thought it a lark to feed the elephant a plug of chewing tobacco. The elephant, who was probably expecting a peanut, planted a tusk in the pit of the boy’s stomach and knocked him down. The news report concluded, “We are happy to state, however, that he is now in a fair way of recovering.” (As an adult, Henry Hall spent much of his life in and out of an insane asylum. Whether this early trauma led to his lunacy, I do not know.)
In May of 1851, a shipment of exotic animals from India arrived in New York; on Saturday, September 6, 1851, they arrived here as part of the “Asiatic Caravan, Museum & Menagerie of P.T. Barnum.”
A team of ten (10) elephants pulled a Car of Juggernaut, “that terrible engine of idolatrous sacrifice, finished and decorated in all the extravagance of the Hindoo style.”
In June of 1854, another touring elephant went rogue while on the road from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to Fall River, Massachusetts. His name was Hannibal. He escaped his keepers, overturned and smashed four wagons, killed three horses, injured six people, and was subdued only after a chase of several miles. On Monday, September 25th, 1854, Hannibal arrived with the Great Broadway Menagerie in Skaneateles.
But Hannibal’s arrival, and the news of his rampage, were overshadowed by the main attraction, two giraffes, Colossus and Cleopatra.
One writer noted:
“The Two Living Giraffes are, alone, worth the price of admittance. They were imported from Egypt by P.T. Barnum at a cost of over $30,000 dollars and may be regarded as the most elegant as well as the tallest of all subordinate animals. They stand 18 feet high, are perfectly gentle and seem like the born aristocrats of their species.”
There would be more elephants in Skaneateles. In June of 1855, the Dan Rice Circus came with Lalla Rookh, who could walk on a tightrope. In August of 1859, the Sand’s, Nathan’s & Co. Circus came with a team of elephants drawing a steam calliope performing “a series of the most popular operatic airs.”
But Colossus and Cleopatra were a once-in-a-village’s-lifetime experience.
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Nathaniel Miller’s elephant story appears in Skaneateles: History of Its Earliest Settlement by Edmund Leslie, on page 37.
The 1837 elephant sighting comes from William Beauchamp’s “Notes of Other Days in Skaneateles,” in the Annual Volume of the Onondaga Historical Association, 1914, p. 19.
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