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Keeping the doors of these early public museums open meant selling
tickets; selling tickets meant continually introducing new attractions
and exhibits to capture the public’s attention and keep them coming
back for more. That took showmanship.

P.T. BARNUM ENTERS THE RING
Foreshadowing trends in American commercial amusement,
Phineas T. (P.T.) Barnum started buying up “collections” in the early
1840s to open his own brand of museum—Barnum’s American
Museum—in 1841.
Early on, the Museum consisted of items from the Peele and
Scudder collections, as well as other curiosity cabinets he had acquired
along the way, but soon Barnum focused on commissioning new
spectacles and live attractions designed to draw in the public. Barnum’s
innate showmanship combined with his eclectic and ever-changing mix
of live and static curiosities quickly captured the public’s attention.
To promote his latest acquisitions, Barnum turned the façade of his
building (he had purchased both Scudder’s collection and the building
that housed his museum) into a promotional billboard. Soon, people
were lining up to see the Siamese twins Chang and Eng, tiny Tom
Thumb, the skeleton of a Feejee Mermaid (made from the head and
torso of a monkey with the body of a fish), a beluga whale, a flea
circus, a loom powered by a dog, and the trunk of a tree under which
sat Jesus’ disciples. While dubious in origin if not outright fakes,
these popular attractions not only increased ticket sales but increased a
city’s tourist trade.
The Museum also promoted educational ends, including natural
history in its menageries, aquaria, and taxidermy exhibits; history in its Barnum’s American Museum in 1858 at the corner of Broadway, Park Row, and
paintings, wax figures, and memorabilia; and temperance reform and Ann Street where it stood before moving up the block to the corner of Fulton Street.
Shakespearean dramas in its “Lecture Room” or theater. Thus, the
museum drew its audience from a wide range of social classes and strove with dime museums, but Barnum was uncontested, at least until a
to assure that the lecture room and salons would be one of the few devastating fire in 1865 that burned his Museum to the ground. Some
respectable public spaces for middle-class women. reportedly cheered at the destruction of the sometimes-depraved
Before the Civil War, P.T. Barnum’s American Museum was museum, but most were horrified at the loss of the city’s major cultural
probably the most popular in America. Imitators sprung up all over destination. Barnum tried again with another location, but that, too,

The museum building and its contents were such a specta-
cle that its destruction by fire in 1865 and that of its suc-
cessor in 1868 were highly publicized as this image shows.
Alfred R. Waud. “The Destruction By Fire Of Barnum’s
American Museum, In New York, July 13, 1865,” 1865.
From Harper’s Weekly, July 29, 1865.

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