Big Top Tragedy
by Judith Sheppard

The first time you hear the story, you might think it’s just urban legend.
But it happened.
On the sunny afternoon of November 22, 1915, a circus train bringing magic acts, bizarre exhibits, Russian dancers and jungle animals to Phenix City crashed
into a passenger train, six miles outside Columbus.

No one on the passenger train was even really hurt, but at least six and some say 12 more members of the Con. T. Kennedy circus died awful deaths within minutes. Scores were injured.

There was no time to save those in cars in the front of the train. A frantic couple managed to shove their 4-year-old daughter out a window of their sleeping car, then were engulfed in the flames. The fire was so fierce that some of the dead were finally identified only by guesswork — a heap of melted coins near a burnt corpse meant it was the penny arcade operator, melted pocket watches and necklaces burnt into flesh identified others. A torso found under the wreckage was first declared a man, then a woman, perhaps a woman masquerading as a man. No one ever knew how many animals were on that train and died, trapped in their cages.

It was news all over the world then. Today it has the ring of a tale told to thrill small children. It might actually be forgotten but for one enduring reminder: a marble memorial in Riverdale Cemetery. Carved out of south Georgia marble to resemble a circus tent, it was put there by Kennedy, who was on that same train.

A curiosity, the monument shows up on a few message boards and websites run by circus and graveyard historians — as unlikely a combination, maybe, as a circus train and tragedy, as a circus tent in a cemetery.

Larger than life
Fantastic as it seems now, the tragedy must have seemed particularly unreal to the eager populace awaiting the show, because the circus operates outside reality — that’s the point. Nobody in the circus is supposed to die, though crowds pay to watch and gasp as acrobats, motorcycle riders and lion tamers come perilously close. Instead, the brightly painted tents shut out the world where awful things happened — World War I was waiting overseas, after all — and closed in a world where strangely beautiful people laughed at fear and sparkled in the spotlight. They couldn’t be dead; they were larger than life.

The day before the wreck, a quarter-page ad in the Enquirer-Sun declared the Kennedy circus was “the last word in carnivaldom,” inviting the public to “six gala days and nights of fun and frolic - cheer and recreation, Oriental magnificence, daredevil feats, inspiring music, song and laughter,” all capped by a solemn lie: “We never fool the people.” Not only did the ad announce a huge downtown parade, where tiny children could almost reach out to touch great elephants, a Wild West
show, a Russian dance troupe and a firefighting horse with the “brain of a human”; a photograph in the November 21 paper previewed conjoined twins (“two children born together and alive”). And the circus promised more: a “congress of the unusual, a gathering of Nature’s strangest people” — including three French dwarves, from Coney Island.

‘ Horror at our door’
So to the train wreck, already dramatic in itself, was added the mind-boggling image of extraordinary creatures spilling out of cages and fighting flames. No wonder that, an era of sensational reporting, Columbus journalists told the story in tones of unabashed awe and horror.

“A flame of blast furnace intensity … ate its way over and into the vitals of showmen, caught like rats in a trap,” reported the Enquirer-Sun on November 23. “The paraphernalia of the carnival company, oiled and richly painted, offered as a ready victim to the roaring flames, and it was but a short while when all that remained was a pile of charred debris and twisted iron of the railway cars.”

Another story reported: “Strong men broke down and wept like children. Women fainted and brains snapped.” The engineers of both trains had seen the collision coming and jumped to safety, but one was spotted wandering down the tracks, watch in hand, saying, “We’ve only got 18 minutes to make it in time. We’ve got to hurry.”

Eyewitnesses’ stories were graphic. One man cut off his foot with an ax to flee the fire. Another was heard begging, “Save me or kill me.” One worker tried unsuccessfully to rescue his brother, father of the child thrown to safety: “For God’s sake save me,” his brother screamed. “It’s not my time to die.” The next day, a story featured the newly orphaned child, sitting with her weeping grandmother, calmly answering questions. “I’m my mama’s baby,” she said, “and I want my mama.”

That night was haunting, according to a journalist: “A harvest moon, resplendent and rising rapidly, fired the heavens late on yesterday’s evening, and in rising cast its beams on one of the most lurid, picturesque and cataclysmic scenes on which its orb had fixed in many a day,” the story began. Those beams fell on Kennedy, “the most spectacular and best liked man in the amusement business in the United States; a man strong in purpose and will,” who wept as he looked on the wreck. Another writer said parrots and monkeys roosted in trees near the wreckage, calling in the night: “The tracks were their natural refuge … and the woods were filled with their screechings and chatterings.”

A shocked Enquirer-Sun editorial was headlined: “Horror at our door.” An unnamed reporter declared: “The terrible occurrence will never be fully written, it can never be given to the public, it was so appalling and so terrifying … (w)ords fail to convey” what torture the helpless witnesses had endured.

But the cliché proved true: the show went on, though not here. A week later another circus train, sent from Kansas by Kennedy’s father-in-law, rolled into Albany and raised its tents there.

The monument remains
As often happens, simple human error caused the collision. A Central of Georgia conductor tried to
question a baffling written order and was rudely rebuffed. Another employee couldn’t explain why he left a routine safety procedure undone. To no one’s surprise, the Interstate Commerce Commission blamed the crew of Central of Georgia No. 2 for failing to wait an extra 20 minutes at Muscogee Junction. The train company settled quickly with Kennedy Shows.

Kennedy erected the Riverdale monument to the wreck’s victims in 1916. Since then, it’s the first thing any visitors to the cemetery ask about, says Deborah Abraham with Columbus Public Services. “A lot of people come by to take a little look of it, take pictures of it,” said Chapman Award, a cemetery maintenance worker. (Contrary to myth, however, no one is buried beneath the memorial.)

Richard Sheffield, a 1965 graduate of Jordan High and now a minister in Maryland, remembers the monument well. He visited it as a child as his grandmother, herself a former tightrope walker, tended family graves. “What we kids liked was the stone,” he recalled in a sermon a few years ago, “carved of white marble to look like a Big Top.” It was poignant, he noted, to consider the fate of those who died “on the way to give people joy.” He frequently compares church services to circus shows — death-defying acts played out under arched ceilings. “Under God’s Big Top,” he once wrote, “we are in the ring.”

But another, little-known monument with slightly more intimate meaning also exists, in the faraway town of Capac, Michigan.

The mother and father on the Kennedy train who saved their child’s life were Fred and Blanche Kempf. Destroyed in the crash was their tiny, famous Model City, “the most ingenious and instructive attraction ever constructed. A live up-to-the-minute city in the noon day of activity,” according to circus advertisements.

Not long after, Irving and Bruce Kempf, Fred’s brothers, began building another. It took seven years to construct “The Mechanical Wonder of the Ages,” a 40-foot-long, 4-foot-wide city, complete with not only a circus but also a harbor with cargo ships and a lighthouse, a suspension bridge, industrial smokestacks, a park, a farm with a barn, silo and sheep, a business district and a main street lined with shops and homes. A motor sets much of the city into action (cars move, the Ferris wheel spins).

The Kempfs took it all over the country with various circuses, finally selling the huge but no longer marketable curiosity to a collector. Time passed. John Grzyb, president of the Capac Historical Society, says that when a New York City actress decided to move home to Capac, just outside Detroit, she and the Society bought the Mechanical Wonder. It’s now on display in the Kempf Museum, located in an old train depot.

The actress’s name was Hazel Helen Kempf, who for more than 70 years lived with the profound knowledge of her parents’ last act. Their short lives, her long one: It’s yet another contrast between the joy the train was bringing and the sorrow it met, between the circus tent and the cemetery, between pretending to face death in a glittering tent and dying in a terrible fire.

Hazel Kempf must have outlived almost all the circus folk who survived that wreck in 1915. She died in 1999. But she was the one who brought the circus home.

Auburn University journalism student Holly Hereth contributed to this story.

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