Sauk County is a county in Wisconsin. It is named after a large village of the Sauk people. As of the 2020 census, the population was 65,763. Its county seat and largest city is Baraboo. The county was created in 1840 from Wisconsin Territory and organized in 1844. Sauk County comprises the Baraboo, WI Micropolitan Statistical Area and is included in the Madison metropolitan area.
Sarasota is a city in and the county seat of Sarasota County, Florida, United States. It is located in Southwest Florida, the southern end of the Greater Tampa Bay Area, and north of Fort Myers and Punta Gorda. Its official limits include Sarasota Bay and several barrier islands between the bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Sarasota is a principal city of the North Port-Bradenton-Sarasota, FL Metropolitan Statistical Area. According to the 2020 U.S. census, Sarasota had a population of 54,842, up from 51,917 at the 2010 census.
Baraboo is the county seat of Sauk County, Wisconsin, United States, located along the Baraboo River. The population was 12,556 as of the 2020 census. The most populous city in the county, Baraboo is the principal city of the Baraboo micropolitan statistical area which comprises a portion of the Madison combined statistical area.
The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, also known as the Ringling Bros. Circus, Ringling Bros., the Barnum & Bailey Circus, Barnum & Bailey, or simply Ringling, is an American traveling circus company billed as The Greatest Show on Earth. It and its predecessor have run shows from 1871, with a hiatus from 2017 to 2023. They operate as Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. The circus started in 1919 when the Barnum & Bailey's Greatest Show on Earth, a circus created by P. T. Barnum and James Anthony Bailey, was merged with the Ringling Bros. World's Greatest Shows. The Ringling brothers purchased Barnum & Bailey Ltd. in 1907 following Bailey's death in 1906, but ran the circuses separately until they were merged in 1919.
Ringling Bros. World's Greatest Shows is a circus founded in Baraboo, Wisconsin, United States in 1884 by five of the seven Ringling brothers: Albert, August, Otto, Alfred T., Charles, John, and Henry. The Ringling brothers were sons of a German immigrant, August Frederick Rüngeling, who changed his name to Ringling once he settled in America. Four brothers were born in McGregor, Iowa: Alf T., Charles, John and Henry. The Ringling family lived in McGregor, Iowa, for twelve years, from 1860 until 1872. The family then lived in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, and moved to Baraboo, Wisconsin, in 1875. In 1907 Ringling Bros. acquired the Barnum & Bailey Circus, merging them in 1919 to become Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, promoted as The Greatest Show on Earth. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey closed on May 21, 2017, following weakening attendance and high operating costs.
Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College was an American circus school which trained around 1,400 clowns in the "Ringling style" from its founding in 1968 until its closure in 1997.
The Circus World Museum is a museum complex in Baraboo, Wisconsin, devoted to circus-related history. The museum features circus artifacts and exhibits and hosts daily live circus performances throughout the summer. It is owned by the Wisconsin Historical Society and operated by the non-profit Circus World Museum Foundation. The museum was the major participant in the Great Circus Parade held from 1963 to 2009.
Charles Edward Ringling was one of the Ringling brothers, who owned the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. He was in charge of production and greatly admired by the employees, who called him "Mr. Charlie" and sought his advice and help even for personal problems.
The Al. Ringling Theatre in Baraboo, Wisconsin, United States, opened its doors in November 1915 and has been operating continuously ever since. Designed by the architectural firm Rapp and Rapp, it was built by Albert Ringling, one of the circus Ringling Brothers, for $100,000. Over the years, it has featured performances from vaudeville and silent movies to grand opera starring such notables as Lionel Barrymore and Mary Pickford.
John Nicholas Ringling was an American entrepreneur who is the best known of the seven Ringling brothers, five of whom merged the Barnum & Bailey Circus with their own Ringling Bros. World's Greatest Shows to create a virtual monopoly of traveling circuses and helped shape the modern circus. In addition to owning and managing many of the largest circuses in the United States, he was also a rancher, a real estate developer and art collector. He was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame in 1987.
Greg and Karen DeSanto are professional circus clowns who performed as a husband-and-wife duo for three decades. Greg DeSanto is the Executive Director of the International Clown Hall of Fame and Research Center in Baraboo, Wisconsin.
The Ringling brothers were five American siblings who transformed their small touring company of performers into one of the largest circuses in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Four brothers were born in McGregor, Iowa: Alfred T., Charles, John and Henry William, and the family lived in McGregor for twelve years, from 1860 until 1872. The Ringling family then moved to Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, and finally settled in Baraboo, Wisconsin, in 1875. They were of German and French descent, the children of harness maker Heinrich Friedrich August Ringling (1826–1898) of Hanover, and Marie Salome Juliar (1833–1907) of Ostheim, in Alsace. While there were seven Ringling brothers, Alfred, Charles, John, Al and Otto Ringling were the main brothers in charge of the circus shows. All of the brothers were Freemasons. In 1919, they merged their Ringling Brothers Circus with America's other leading circus troupe, Barnum and Bailey, ultimately creating the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, which has operated continuously since except for a hiatus from 2017 to 2022.
This is a list of the National Register of Historic Places listings in Sauk County, Wisconsin. It is intended to provide a comprehensive listing of entries in the National Register of Historic Places that are located in Sauk County, Wisconsin. The locations of National Register properties for which the latitude and longitude coordinates are included below may be seen on a map.
The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art is the official state art museum of Florida, located in Sarasota, Florida. It was established in 1927 as the legacy of Mable Burton Ringling and John Ringling for the people of Florida. Florida State University assumed governance of the museum in 2000.
The Walworth D. Porter Duplex Residence is located in Baraboo, Wisconsin. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1996.
Otto Ringling was an American Circusman, businessman, and the third oldest of the Ringling brothers. He was the co-founder of the Ringling Bros. World's Greatest Shows, which eventually became the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. He was called the "Lieutenant General" of the Ringling family. Upon his death, the New York Times described him as "a man of great ideas and ambition, and an executive of force and character." He was nicknamed "The King" in the circus business.
The Baraboo Public Library, also known as the Carnegie-Schadde Memorial Public Library, is the public library serving Baraboo, Wisconsin. Located at 230 4th Avenue, the Carnegie library was built in 1903. It was one of the first small-scale Carnegie libraries in Wisconsin. Architects Claude and Starck of Madison designed the Neoclassical building; the firm designed 39 libraries in the early twentieth century, many of which were funded by Carnegie, and the Baraboo library was one of their first works. The library's design features a projecting entrance portico flanked by Ionic columns and topped with a pediment and a dentillated entablature along the bottom of the tiled hip roof.
The Charles Ringling House is a historic house at 201 8th Street in Baraboo, Wisconsin. Charles Ringling, one of the five brothers who founded the Ringling Brothers Circus, had the house built in 1900 for his family. Brothers George and Karl Isenberg of Baraboo built the Georgian Revival house. The two-story house features a long front porch supported by Ionic columns, a balustrade along the porch roof, two-story pilasters dividing the house's three bays, and a pediment atop the central bay. The property also includes a carriage house, a cottage, and a barn. Ringling and his wife Edith lived in the house until 1912, when they moved to Sarasota, Florida.
The Thompson House Hotel is a historic hotel building at 200 Ash Street in Baraboo, Wisconsin. John Thompson built the hotel in 1899 to replace an older hotel on the site, which he had owned since the early 1890s. The two-story Italianate building features door and window heads and banding in dark-colored brick as well as a bracketed cornice. The first floor housed a dining room, which was later converted to a saloon, along with the innkeeper's quarters and storage rooms; the second floor had twenty guest rooms. The hotel was part of a group of hotels near the Baraboo railroad station and Ringling Brothers Circus headquarters; these hotels served tourists, circus workers, and traveling salesmen. Thompson sold the hotel before 1915, but it operated as a hotel under several names until the 1960s; it has since been converted to apartments.
The Downtown Baraboo Historic District is a national historic district in downtown Baraboo, Wisconsin. The district encompasses 78 contributing buildings, most of which are commercial buildings centered around the Sauk County Courthouse square. Development in the district began in the 1840s; at the time, the courthouse district was considered the wealthy part of Baraboo by comparison to the more industrial areas by the Baraboo River and the railroad. The oldest contributing buildings in the district date to the 1870s, when economic growth in Baraboo and a series of fires that destroyed older buildings spurred extensive construction in the courthouse district. New buildings continued to be built in the district through the mid-twentieth century, with the latest contributing building being the 1966 Baraboo City Hall. The district includes examples of most popular architectural styles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Italianate, Romanesque Revival, Neoclassical, Colonial Revival and other revival styles, Beaux-Arts, Prairie School, Modernist, and vernacular commercial styles.
