Sarasota County

Roll up Roll up, the circus is in town. The train has been unloaded and the big tent is up and ready to welcome you.
First of all there is the circus cook house where everyday:-
2 barrels of sugar
30 gallons of milk 🥛
110 dozen of oranges 🍊
200 lbs of tea and coffee ☕️
226 dozen eggs 🥚
2220 loaves of bread 🍞
2479 lbs of fresh meat
and plenty more items etc etc ....

Now it's time to take a trip to the Ringling Museum and the World's Largest Littlest Big Top. In sunny Sarasota, hides Howard Tibbal's life work -- an exact 3/4-inch-to-the-foot scale replica of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus as it might have looked from 1919 - 1938.
All the fixings are present -- acrobats fly gracefully above the audience. A legion of mess hall workers bustles to prepare the daily meals. Horses shuffle in their stalls, children sneak peaks into the dark halls of the freak show, and Goliath the ferocious Elephant Seal bellows at onlookers. The Howard Bros. Circus, named after its creator, is 3,800 square feet in size and shows off the entire circus process from the railway to the rodeo.

The scale of it is mindboggling, and in perfect detail to boot. For over 50 years Tibbals has worked with excruciating effort to recreate old circuses from photographs, posters, schematics and old news articles. Thousands of figures the size of your thumb populate the tiny grounds as patrons and performers. Animals from pups to elephants number in the hundreds. Tents tower overhead. In fact, there's so much going on that an observation deck was created just for you to get a bird's eye view and take it all in.Read more