Madame Elnora, Charles Lee, and the Sunday School Circus

There was a time when winter in Canton, Bradford County, brought with it a rather unusual collection of residents. There were circus horses in the barns. Performers practicing their acts. Wagons waiting to be painted and repaired. Dogs being trained for the coming season. And, according to an old Canton recollection, there was a boa constrictor spending the cold Pennsylvania winter wrapped in woolen blankets in a box behind the kitchen stove. The snake belonged to Madame Elnora. And Madame Elnora belonged to one of the more unusual chapters in the history of northern Pennsylvania. Her real name was Elnora Rogers Lee. She had grown up in Hillsgrove Township in Sullivan County, the daughter of Richard and Susannah Craven Rogers.

Her husband was Charles Lee, a circus man associated by local histories with the Hughesville and Muncy area of Lycoming County. Together, Charles and Elnora would operate a traveling circus whose winter home became Canton. It was known as Charles Lee’s Great London Shows. But among some circus people, it acquired another name. They called it... “The Sunday School Show.”

Charles Lee had been involved in a wagon circus with a partner named Scribner. When that partnership ended in the late 1880s, Lee was traveling through Canton with his portion of the show. Something about the community appealed to him, and he decided to stay.

By the early 1890s, he had purchased land east of Canton and developed winter quarters for his circus. There was a ring barn for training and rehearsal, buildings for animals, and places where equipment could be repaired and prepared for another season on the road.

In winter, the circus rested. But it did not sleep. There were horses to train. Harnesses to mend. Canvas to repair. Wagons to paint. Acts to rehearse. And when spring returned, the wagons rolled out of Canton again. The Great London Shows was a wagon circus. That meant moving performers, animals, tents, equipment, food, costumes and supplies from town to town largely over the roads of the 1890s. A surviving route book from the 1890 season shows the circus leaving Canton for Troy, then Towanda, LeRaysville and Montrose before continuing into New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Some moves were twenty miles or more between performances. At the next town, the entire circus had to rise again. The tent went up. The animals were cared for. The band assembled. The performers dressed. And before long, the people of another little town were watching a circus parade come down their main street. By 1892, Charles Lee’s operation had become surprisingly large. Contemporary circus reports list more than a hundred employees.

There were two bands, canvasmen, teamsters, grooms, cooks, musicians, acrobats, equestrians, comedians and sideshow performers. And prominently among the performers was Charles Lee’s wife. Elnora was no passive circus proprietor’s wife. She was Madame Elnora. Circus advertising described her performing on wire and trapeze. She worked with trained ponies and presented a troupe of performing dogs. One advertisement even proclaimed Mrs. Charles Lee the only lady horse trainer in America.

Circus advertising was rarely troubled by excessive modesty, so that particular claim should probably be treated with caution. But there is no question that Elnora was a working performer and animal trainer. And then there was that snake. Decades later, Canton residents still remembered Elnora’s large boa constrictor. Pennsylvania winters were not particularly suitable for tropical snakes. So, according to the recollection, Elnora wrapped the boa in woolen blankets and kept its box behind the kitchen stove. When warm weather returned, she carried the snake outdoors into the sunshine, bathed it and rubbed oil over its skin until it was ready once more to be displayed before paying customers.

It is a story preserved many years afterward rather than in the contemporary circus trade papers. But it must have made quite an impression upon those who remembered it. One wonders how many visitors to the Lee household were invited to sit by the stove...without being told what was sleeping behind it.

The Lees also seem to have wanted their circus to maintain a respectable reputation. Contemporary accounts emphasized that drunkenness among employees was not tolerated. One newspaper praised the courtesy shown to customers and described the Great London Shows as offering a fifty-cent performance for twenty-five-cent admission. Another emphasized that the entertainment was free of objectionable features. That reputation apparently amused some of the rougher members of the circus profession. They gave Lee’s outfit a nickname. The Sunday School Show. Perhaps Charles Lee didn't mind. Families bought circus tickets too.

But moving a circus over country roads could be dangerous. On May 17, 1891, the Great London Shows performed at Troy, in Bradford County. It rained heavily. When the performance was over, the circus still had to move. Sometime that night, the wagons started toward Burlington. The first wagon carried the great circus tent. After hours of rain, the canvas was soaked with water and enormously heavy. Boss hostler Walter Rockwell drove the wagon, pulled by four horses. They reached the old covered bridge at Long’s Mill. Floodwater had weakened the bridge's center pier. As Rockwell and the four horses reached the middle... the pier collapsed.

The bridge gave way beneath them. Rockwell, the horses, and the wagon carrying the water-soaked circus tent plunged into the rushing water. The current swept them toward the dam. Rockwell found himself underwater, encumbered by his rain slicker. He managed to unbutton it, wriggle free and swim.

Remarkably... both Rockwell and the horses survived. Years afterward, another detail entered the story. Someone had painted a warning on the stonework near the dam: “Prepare to Meet Thy God.” It was said that Rockwell saw those words immediately before he went over. It makes a wonderful story. There is only one difficulty. Rockwell’s own wife later doubted it. She pointed out that her husband was underneath the wagon at the time and probably couldn't have seen the words at all. And that is how history sometimes works. The circus story survived. Then a better story grew around it. And fortunately, someone who knew Walter Rockwell was still there to separate one from the other.

Charles Lee also possessed an eye for talent. According to the Canton account, while the circus was playing one town, Lee noticed a young boy performing cartwheels. The youngster apparently had no stable parental home. Lee saw something in him. He brought the boy into the circus and eventually became his foster father. The boy's name was Charles Patterson. Around Canton, he became known as Charles Lee. The circus world would eventually know him by another name: Charles Siegrist. Under Lee’s guidance, the youngster learned the circus trade. He became a bareback rider, tumbler, and aerial performer. Eventually he left the little Pennsylvania wagon circus for the largest tents in America.

In 1898, Siegrist joined a major aerial troupe associated with the Ringling organization. He became one of the outstanding aerial performers of his generation. More than thirty years later, in 1930, Siegrist was performing a flying act at Madison Square Garden when something went terribly wrong. He struck the edge of the safety net. His neck was broken. Doctors reportedly told him his aerial career was finished. Five months later...Charles Siegrist was performing again. He remained associated with circus performance into old age and was eventually inducted into the Circus Hall of Fame. The boy doing cartwheels whom Charles Lee noticed in a small town had traveled a very long way.

Meanwhile, the man who had discovered him was approaching the end of his own career. During the summer of 1896, Charles Lee suffered a severe stroke. For a man whose livelihood depended upon constant movement, the consequences were devastating. By the following spring, announcements indicated that the circus would continue under new management. Circus trade records tell an even harsher story.

In December 1896, Lee’s Great London Show was sold by the sheriff at Phoenix, New York. Charles Lee's days of taking his circus down the road were essentially over. He eventually sold his property outside Canton. But the name Charles Lee’s Great London Shows proved harder to kill than the original circus. Other showmen acquired the rights to it. By 1900, circus trade publications reported that Fred N. Price and Colonel C. M. Honeywell had purchased the name and intended to enlarge the operation. Lee himself was described as living in retirement at Canton, an invalid for several years. The Great London name continued traveling. The man whose name was painted on the wagons did not.

And in 1905, the old circus name returned to Sullivan County. On April 30, Charles Lee’s Great London Shows appeared at Dushore. An old Sullivan County account remembered that what arrived did not entirely live up to what had been promised on the circus posters. But there was a grand street parade at noon. Admission was twenty-f ve cents. By then, however, the circus was Charles Lee’s mostly in name. The original show had already passed into history. And that same year, Charles Lee died. He was buried at Canton.

Madame Elnora—the Hillsgrove girl who had become a circus performer, horse trainer and mistress of performing dogs—survived him for a time and was eventually buried beside him. There is something appropriate about their story spanning three Pennsylvania counties. Lycoming County, associated with Charles Lee’s beginnings. Sullivan County, where Elnora Rogers grew up among the mountains around Hillsgrove. And Bradford County, where together they found a home for their circus.

For a few years near the end of the nineteenth century, the arrival of spring in Canton meant that painted wagons would begin moving once again. Down the Country roads. Through Pennsylvania. Into New York and New England.

All of that is gone now. But for a little while, tucked among the hills and valleys of northern Pennsylvania, Charles Lee and Madame Elnora created their own version of the greatest show on earth. A circus respectable enough to be called— perhaps not entirely affectionately— The Sunday School Show.

And that, too, is one of our Susquehanna Footprints.