CULPEPPER & MERRIWEATHER CIRCUS

The little big top
A small traveling circus charms an audience in Harrisburg


Circus workers raise the 80-foot-diameter tent for Saturday performances in Harrisburg of The Culpepper and Merriweather Circus. The little circus rolled into town -- complete with animals, aerialists and clowns -- in the morning and was soon ready for a 2 p.m. show. The day before the circus performed in Oakridge. The old-fashioned show performs two shows a day and seven days a week during a 30-week season.
(Paul Carter/The Register-Guard)
By Jack Moran
from: the RegisterGuard.com
May 26, 2013
HARRISBURG, OR — Cave Junction. Riddle. Drain. Oakridge. And on Saturday, Harrisburg
 Every year since 1985, these are the types of small towns that have played host to the Culpepper & Merriweather Circus, whose 30-person cast and crew (along with horses, two tigers and a lion named Francis) caravans across the country for eight straight months while putting on almost 500 shows annually.

Solomon, a 10-year-old male tiger, comes eye to eye with a young circus fan in Harrisburg Saturday. The Culpepper & Merriweather Circus visited town for two shows during the show's 488 performances during a 30-week season. (Paul Carter/The Register-Guard)
“It’s a hard way to do it, but what you get is something that has a lot of heart and soul that you don’t see with a bigger show,” circus clown Nathan Holguin said, speaking from experience.
Before he joined the Hugo, Okla.-based circus as Punchy the clown, the 40-year-old Holguin played Madison Square Garden and other major-league venues while performing with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus — the self-proclaimed “Greatest Show on Earth.”
“That’s fun, too, but this has a different kind of charm,” Holguin said.
Years ago, traveling “mug show” circuses regularly pitched tents in Harrisburg and put on shows for the locals. That ended sometime around 1970, and the riverside city in Linn County went about four decades without a circus visit.

 

Tent poles are driven the old-fashioned way -- with brute force applied by three well-timed sledge hammers. The circus crew had the show's two-ton tent up in about an hour of well choreographed labor.
(Paul Carter/The Register-Guard)
In 2011, local officials got Culpepper & Merriweather to schedule a stop there. A few hundred people attended those shows, and the troupe returned Saturday for a pair of performances that helped raise money for the Harrisburg Elementary School Parent Club and the Harrisburg Library Guild.
“It’s a really neat thing for the community,” City Administrator Bruce Cleeton said.
Cleeton and his family stood among the 40 or so people who showed up early Saturday morning to watch a team of circus workers hustle to drive stakes into the ground before methodically putting up Culpepper & Merriweather’s red, white and blue striped tent in a gravel lot across Smith Street from Heritage Park.
About half of those who witnessed the lot being transformed into the circus grounds were children, most of whom appeared fascinated with the show’s tigers and lion.
“I came to see those big tigers,” Abe Noll, 6, said before announcing through a toothy grin that he had $21 to spend on cotton candy and other treats from the circus midway.
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