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The off-season test
A winter quarters is the one way a traveling show becomes a standing animal collection — the animals come home in the fall and stay — and Mishawaka never had one. Indiana kept celebrated ones elsewhere: Peru, where B. E. Wallace's circus wintered, and Rochester, the Cole Bros. town, both named in the period press. No show wintered in Mishawaka in any record reached, and the shows documented on Mishawaka ground wintered somewhere else by their own books — the LaPearl show at Danville, Illinois, and Mills Bros. at Ashland and later Jefferson, Ohio. The negative is printed plainly, with the other towns' addresses named, so the reader can see the test was run against the real thing and not against a straw man.
Principal sources
- Period press on Indiana circus winter quarters (Indianapolis News, 21 April 1903 — Wallace at Peru; Rochester Sentinel — Cole Bros. at Rochester).
- Circus Historical Society route records — the visiting shows' own winter-quarters lines (Danville, Illinois; Ashland and Jefferson, Ohio).