By Kristen Kauffman

Sixty years later the children of 1930s Prescott still remembered the elephants on Mount Vernon.

In the early 1990s, Sharlot Hall Museum interviewed several town residents about what they remembered from Prescott’s early history. Mittie Cobey, Leslie Eckhert, A.L. Favour, and Augustine “Gus” Rodarte Jr. all fondly remembered the circus. They didn’t always remember the names of the troupes that came, but all remembered the animals walking from where they were unloaded at the train depot to the circus performance grounds, the place they called “the ball park” that we now call Ken Lindley Field.

Mittie Cobey ran to the railroad yard because her dad was an engineer; she went to see if he was coming into town and was surprised to see the circus rolling in instead. Rodarte said, “As a matter [of] fact, my dad would go over there and help set the tents and so forth, so he could get some passes. He used the passes for him and Mom and maybe a couple of the other kids…And it was a very exciting time. The train would unload, I believe it was on the west side of the depot, because they had these sidings where they could put the boxcars to be unloaded.”

Favour, a Prescott High School graduate in 1932 and an Arizona House legislator in 1943, remembered the circus from the 1920s. “[T]hey’d come here every year, and they’d unload the animals down at the station, and they’d parade the animals up to what is now Ken Lindley Field. That was the circus location. We called it ‘the ball park’ in those days. There was no grandstands, there was no nothing –it was just a great big open field.”

Rodarte said he would do anything to save money for a ticket. “I would mow lawns, cut weeds –anything so I could get to the circus. The last time that I went to one, I made forty cents, and I went up and I asked the ticket-taker if I could get in for forty cents. The chief of police was standing next to him, and he said, ‘Go ahead, let him in.’ So I got in for forty cents.”

Some kids, desperate to see the circus, snuck in. Favour confessed that “[o]ne time I got caught sneaking in and they made me water the elephants, and that’s an endless job, to water elephants. You have to pack bucket after bucket.”

When the tent was up and the circus was ready to perform, they paraded the animals around town, which is why Cobie remembered elephants on Mount Vernon. Favour remembered, “[B]efore the first performance, they would have a parade. They’d go downtown, around the square, back up and then have the ceremony, the show. Usually they had two tents, a big tent and then a small tent with the strong man and the tattooed lady.”

Circuses have been coming through Prescott for some time. In January of 1873, The Arizona Miner recorded the tragic story of a traveling circus family --The Lee Family-- murdered while traveling through Arizona. Favour remembered the Al. G. Barnes Circus coming to town; it toured from 1895 until it was purchased by the American Circus Corporation and stopped touring in 1938. Children of the 1930s remembered the Sells-Floto Circus (which was acquired by the American Circus Corporation in 1929), and the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey, which still tours. In the 1960s, Prescott stopped hosting the circus at Ken Lindley Field and started hosting at the fairgrounds. The most recent circus in Prescott was the Du Portugal Circus in 2022.