SYMHC Classics: History of Carousels

This 2015 episode delves into carousels. They're part of childhood, but they were originally billed as an entertainment for adults and children alike. And even further back than that, it's believed that they were used to train horsemen.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. We thought that for today's Saturday Classic we
would choose a topic that's on the lighter side, and
this one mostly is a couple of moments, not as like,
but mostly on the lighter side. It is our history
of Carousels, which originally came out March. And we usually
snip out the listener mail segment of our Saturday Classics

(00:24):
since they're usually referencing some other long ago episode that
people may not have heard recently and it could just
be a little jarring. But in this case, the listener
mail inspired the episode, so stay tuned for it at
the end, So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in
History Class a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and

(00:50):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy B. Wilson,
and today we're doing another listener request hooray, and it's
a really delightful one. But I'm actually going to save
the information about the listener email that requested it for
the end of the episode. It'll be our listener mail
segment because it adds a nice coda to the whole story.

(01:11):
Uh So, Tracy, I am sure you remember writing a
carousel or Merry go around as a child, maybe even
as an adult. It is, or at least was a
pretty common part of childhood, but carousels have kind of
become a less and less of an of the moment
kind of part of childhood, even though there are still

(01:31):
a number around and people do still enjoy them, but
they are in some ways part of history, and they
have their own really interesting history there by no means gone,
and we're going to talk about some of the modern
developments in them at the end, but their prevalence in
the entertainment landscape is not what it once was. They
used to be much more of like an event item
and centerpiece to amusement parks, and so we're actually going

(01:55):
to talk about a few things in this episode. We're
going to talk first about general carousel history, and then
we're gonna talk briefly about a couple of key innovators
in carousels, and then at the very end there's kind
of a neat story that we're going to talk about
about one particular carousel that has its own history that's
related to the civil rights movement. So it sounds like

(02:16):
a lot, but we're doing, you know, they're kind of
the brief versions of any of those stories. So this
first chuncolate that we're talking about is consistently told anytime
you look at a history of carousels, But in terms
of hard substantiation, it's difficult to come by. It's almost
one of those things that it could be all completely true,
but it could also be one of those things that's

(02:37):
been repeated so much that people accepted as history. Uh.
But like I said, we don't have like so much
hard proof on this one. So yes, and it's so
delightful that it would be such a shame not to
talk about it. So the possible, the possibly apocryphal story
of carousels actually starts back in the twelfth century with
a game played by Turkish and Arabian horsemen. And to

(03:00):
play this game, the riders would toss a clay ball
containing perfume back and forth while they were on horseback,
and if a player didn't successfully catch the ball, it
would break and it would cover him in the scent
of failure. Yeah, he would smell good, presumably it was
a perfume, but everyone would know that he had lost.
So it's it's kind of an awkward consolation prize to

(03:22):
smell lovely. But uh, that being kind of the identifier
that you were not as skilled as your challengers. Italian
and Spanish crusaders are said to have witnessed this game
taking place, and that they eventually brought it back to
Europe and there it took on the name Catrocella or
Gero slo uh, depending on which language you're speaking, and
that translated at that time to little War. Later on,

(03:46):
the French adopted this game and they expanded their play
to include multiple equestrian challenges. These developed into competitions called carousels,
and participants needed to practice for their matches, so a
training mechanism was developed that had wooden horses mounted on
arms that were suspended from big poles or chains, and

(04:06):
they rotated around a central central point. There wasn't really
a floor on these carousels. Yeah, it's really um. You know,
they're all kind of dangling from above, So not quite
the way you would think of a Carouselar and Merry
go around today, but you know, again dangling. There are
other um rides that have have become popular that are

(04:30):
similar where you spin ours, but I'm like, this is
it's like the swings at the carnival, where you sit
in the swing and it turns and you swing out. Yes,
but for a long time, that's how carousels worked, so uh.
Some versions of these training carousels were pulled by horses
or mules, others were powered by humans. There would often
be a hand crank or a pull rope that created

(04:50):
the movement, and the horsemen would participate in various games
while they were riding these training steeds. And I'm being
very generous because apparently they were very rudimentary quote horses. Uh.
And one of the games that they would play included
trying to spear a ring with a jousting lance. So
if you have ever been on a carousel with a
ring for riders to grab as they pass under or

(05:11):
buy it, uh, this is a callback allegedly to this game,
although those have become less and less popular. This is
also where that expression grabbed the brass ring comes from,
as the brass ring to be the most prized of
the rings on a carousel game like this. More often
you would see iron rings and then there would be
an occasional brass ring. So that association of grabbing the

(05:33):
brass ring with you know, going after the big prize
or going after something is comes all from this. So
watching sports has been a pastime for as long as
there have been sports, and so spectators watched the horsemen practice,
and they're said to have grown interested in trying it
out for themselves. So where there's the demand, there are
usually people who are ready to fill it for a price.

(05:56):
And by the late seventeen hundreds carousels were being made
not for sports training but for entertainment, and for the
next hundred years or so, these simple man and mule
power divertisements because they worked pretty much exactly the same
way as the training ones, they were just gussied up
in a more fun way. Uh, we're appearing at European
festivals and fairs pretty consistently. But because they were powered

(06:20):
either by man or animal, they had to stay pretty
much on the small side. Victorian circus entrepreneur Lord George
Sanger described the early hand cranked carousels his father once
made in his book Seventy Years a Showman. These rudimentary,
early merrygarounds had horses that weren't realistic, but they were colorful.

(06:41):
The horses manes and tails are made using rabbit fur,
and because these still required a living creature, to power them.
Kids were generally employed to push carousels like singers to
get these mechanisms to spin. So these were usually the
kids that could not afford to pay for a ride themselves,

(07:02):
so they would push for the day and then at
the end of the day they would be paid with
free rides. There are some sort of dicey tails, mostly apocryphal,
but I'm sure some of this happened of sort of
near slave labor at some fairs where kids weren't really
treated all that well. Uh, But for the most part
it seems to have been like a pay for play situation.

(07:22):
You come and do this work, and then at the
end of the day you get rewarded with a ride
on the carousel. And some mechanisms did not involve children,
and they were turned by horses or, more often at fairs, ponies.
The velocipede was an interesting variation on this idea. Bicycles
mounted around the outside edge of the carousel would generate
the circular motion. Those things look so fun to me now.

(07:45):
I'm reminded for a moment of a ride at the
Georgia Renaissance Festival where you sit in it and it's
mounted from a pole. In the center and the people
push it to turn it all the way up the
pole and it rises up as the thing that's suspending
it gets after on the pole and then they let
go and you spin on the way down. Oh I

(08:05):
don't I'm having trouble recalling that one. But I maybe
never paid attention to the rides at the Renaisance Festival.
I was probably too busy eating. Uh. In eighteen sixty one,
there was a major leap forward when steam entered the
picture as a way to power carousels without direct man
or animal power. On New Year's Day, Thomas Bradshaw debuted

(08:26):
his steam driven carousel in Bolton, England, and it contained
a London built boiler unit, an engine, and horses that
have been made by Bradshaw himself, and he patented his
carousel design in eighteen sixty three. A similar carousel, which
may actually have been the same one from the eighteen
sixty one Bolton debut, was operating at a fair in

(08:46):
Halifax in eighteen sixty three, and while carousel technology was
moving forward, it wasn't really met with universal enthusiasm at
the outset. Yeah. A journalist who was describing this installation
in Halifax described the mechanism as mammoth and overpowered, and
he wondered how riders were not shot off their mounts

(09:07):
like cannon balls. Uh. Local residents also fretted over the
possibility that the whole thing would explode explode from the
pressure of the boiler unit, and there were some claims
and accusations made that they were endangering children by having
this ride available. However, there were not any explosions, and

(09:28):
people did continue to be interested in carousels, and the
next couple of years several more of them appeared around Britain.
There's even a newspaper report of a stay a steam
driven velocipede at King's lynmart in eighteen sixty six, although
the records of the mechanism are incomplete, and I'm a
little like, how do you combine the bicycles and the steam? Yeah,

(09:48):
I don't know, but it sounded so fascinating to me. Um.
And then once carousels crossed the Atlantic to the US,
they really underwent a huge transformation and they became bigger
and flashier and more color full, and the horses became
far more intricate and detailed. Uh. There it was a
little bit of a shift to sort of the art
of it in many ways. Because the late eighteen hundred

(10:11):
saw major advancements and technology and industry, it wasn't long
before the carousel saw them too. The so called Golden
Age of carousel's started around eighteen eighty and this was
when merry grounds integrated flooring platforms and up and down
movement of the animals as they circled the central mechanism.
Other variations were tried, including coiled springs to add bounce,

(10:34):
and even animals mounted on undulating tracks to create an
up and down movement. The carousel at the Little Rock,
Arkansas Zoo, which is called Over the Jumps, still uses
an undulating track and it's been fully refurbished. If you
ever want to ride one, yeah, so that one instead
of like the pole sort of moving up and down,
it just follows this nice wave pattern track, so you

(10:56):
just go up and down. It's a little more of
a rolling hill effect. It's quite gentle, and as well
as all of the technical advancements, there were some pretty
amazing artistic strides going on. So in the US, carousels
UH did not restrict themselves to featuring horses alone, so
soon unicorns lions, guerrillas, dolphins, giraffes, and a host of
other animals made appearances as mounts on carousels. For five decades,

(11:21):
carousels stood as the main attraction affairs and amusement parks
throughout the United States, and people marveled at their beauty
and their craftsmanship. Carousel rides were a much consumed entertainment
diversion for adults as well as kids, and several different
styles developed in the carousel world in the US. UH.
The Coney Island style it's sometimes called, is sort of

(11:45):
a show ear style. The horses are painted in really
bright colors, and they often have jewels attached and metallic
leaf and the rest of the unit, like the the
central part in the ceilings often feature multitudes of light
catching mirror. And then the Philadelphia style UH is a
little bit more realistic in the way its animals are

(12:06):
painted and created and carved, and it's associated usually with
really exquisite craftsmanship. The county fair style is populated with
much simpler designs. UH. These merrygo rounds are usually intended
to move from place to place like county fairs do,
so they are by necessity a lot less complex and
they don't have as much decoration. And then just as

(12:26):
the culture of carousels had really embedded itself in the
Americana landscape, the Great Depression happened. Like a lot of industries,
carousel production was hit really hard, and a lot of
companies significantly reduced their output or closed up shop altogether.
The Golden Age of carousels had ended. And it's estimated
that more than four thousand carousels were made in the

(12:48):
United States during the Golden Age. Fewer than a hundred
and fifty of these are still intact. Uh And we'll
talk a little bit about some restoration efforts later on.
But next we're going to talk about a couple of
important men in carousel history. There's certainly more than two,
but in the interests of time, we had to kind
of pick two that are important. But before we talk

(13:11):
about them, let's pause for a quick sponsor break. One
of the big names in carousel's is Gustave Denzel, and
he was originally from Germany and he immigrated to the
US in the mid eighteen hundreds, and as a boy,

(13:32):
Denzel had traveled throughout Germany with his family in the summers,
helping them run their carousel ride. In the eighteen sixties,
Gustave's father shipped the young man, his brothers, and a
carousel to America on a steamer. When they got there,
they brought Philadelphia one of the first carousels in the
United States and they set up shop there. Yeah, so

(13:52):
that's uh, you know, happening at the same time that
things like the steam power are coming into being. It's
a little bit after that, uh uh you know. So
while England is having this little boom of of carousels,
it is shipping across the Atlantic at the same time,
and there it was certainly happening in other parts of
Europe as well. The Denzel family built this reputation of

(14:12):
incredible craftsmanship and they set the tone of realism that
came to be associated with the Philadelphia style of carousels.
And what's really interesting is that their style stayed really
consistent throughout the years, even with changes in leadership to
the company. Gustave died in nineteen o nine, at which
point his son's William and Edward, took over the family business.

(14:33):
In nineteen twenty, Edward moved to California to run a
West Coast carousel business and Williams stayed in Philadelphia, and
after almost twenty years helming the Denzel Carousel Company, William
died in seven and the company folded soon thereafter, and
Edward decided to remain in California. He eventually became mayor

(14:54):
of Beverly Hills. Eventually, Edward's son, who was also named William,
restarted the family business, and his son, William Denzel the
third still continues this five generation tradition of elegance, both
crafting new pieces and restoring older hair cells. Yeah, one

(15:15):
of the things that you'll find if you start looking
around online is that a lot of these companies have
had sort of a resurgence, and often it's it's family
members that have reopened them or have just kind of
bolstered them when they were struggling and are now running
them again, which is kind of a lovely, sort of
heartwarming part of it. Um. The other man that we're
going to talk about today is Charles I. D. Loof, and,

(15:36):
like Denzel, Luf was originally from Europe. He was born
in Denmark in eighteen fifty two, and he moved to
the US in eighteen seventy at the age of eighteen
and at first, he started as a furniture carver. His
carousel carving actually started as a hobby. It was something
he did with his furniture making skills in his off hours,
but it soon sort of started to become a passion,

(15:58):
and just five years after arriving in New York, he
opened his first Coney Island carousel for business. Luke saw
the potential of an amusement destination and he was instrumental
in developing Coney Island as a permanent attraction. Yeah. He
also is often credited with developing or being a major
contributor to the Coney Island style of carousel horses. And

(16:20):
five years after he opened his carousel and Coney Island,
he opened a carousel factory in Brooklyn and he stayed
in that location from eighteen eighty until sometime in late
nineteen o four or early nineteen o five, and at
that point he moved the business to Riverside, Rhode Island.
In nineteen ten, he moved again, but this time much further.
He went across the country to California, and there he

(16:42):
was instrumental in the development of Venice Beach and the
Santa Monica Piers amusement attractions. Unfortunately, Luf's work building up
the role of amusement parks in America turned out to
be part of the carousel's downfall. Working with his son
Arthur Charles Luf and the Wholesome Entertainment News he helped
build created this perfect platform for the rise in popularity

(17:04):
of a different attraction, the roller coaster. And as roller
coasters became more and more common, they already existed before this,
but they really started to get a groundhold in terms
of popularity in the amusement industry, in large part due
to Luf creating these sort of parks where people would
go uh. They started drawing more and more crowds and

(17:26):
interesting carousels started to wane because this was a much
more exciting and thrilling ride uh. And to try to
regain some market share, the marketing for carousels sort of
shifted to be like more about kids and children's entertainment, Whereas,
as we mentioned prior to that, they were touted as
diversions for children and adults equally. But between the newer

(17:47):
and more thrilling options and the onset of the Great Depression,
there just wasn't anyway for merry grounds to keep their
previous status, and when Luke died in all management of
their California Here ventures went to his son, and Arthur
eventually sold off the portion of the Peer that the
family owned, although he continued to operate attractions there for

(18:08):
several years. But eventually the Loof's contracts they're all expired
and their mini empire was dismantled. Uh The carousel, which
had originally been part of Loose Santa Monica amusement center
called the Hippodrome, was sold off in parts to collectors.
The Hippodrome incidentally, was actually saved from demolition in the
nineteen seventies when Robert Redford and Paul Newman, as well

(18:31):
as other local activists saved it, and it still stands today.
It's been renovated a few times and it has a
different carousel in it. So before we delve into one
carousel's significance in civil rights history, let's have a quick
word from a sponsor that sounds super duper. So there's

(18:56):
one particular carousel that's connected to the history of the
US civil rights movement. Yeah, it's not like it had
a huge, big impact, but it's kind of just a
really beautiful story um and it's a carousel that still
exists today. So as the March on Washington was taking
place in August nineteen sixty three, a smaller but still
important event was taking place forty miles north of the city,

(19:19):
and on that day, a white, solely amusement park called
gwyn Oak allowed black children in for the first time.
Sharon Langley, he was only eleven months old at the
time and was held in place on the saddle by
her father, was the first African American child to ride
the carousel at the park, along with white children. And unfortunately,
just a few years after the amusement park desegregated, it

(19:42):
actually closed for good, and after a few more years,
the carousel that had stood at Gwynn Park was purchased
by the Smithsonian that was in and at that point
it was moved to the National Mall. Seven years after
it's moved to the mall, standing Donna Hunter purchased the
carousel uh and they have since barrated it there on
the mall. But during all that time, no one knew

(20:03):
of this kind of interesting little piece of history attached
to it. Amy Nathan and author researching civil rights history,
finally put all the pieces together in two thousand eleven
and notified the hunters of their merriagor rounds historical significance.
It became part of Nathan's book Round and Round Together,
Taking Your Ride into Civil Rights History, and the Nathan's
have repainted the horse that Langley rode that day to

(20:25):
commemorate the Civil rights movement. The National Park Service has
also included the carousel in educational programming about civil rights. Yeah.
I just love that there's this wonderful piece of like
children's history that's also a part of the civil rights movement.
There's a really sweet picture of Langley writing it with
her dad holding her when she's eleven months old, and

(20:47):
then as an adult, once they figured out this little
piece of history, she went back and wrote it again
and it's just so heartwarming. Uh So, while carousels did
not vanish completely with a great depression, they certainly experience
is to drop in terms of their presence and their popularity.
And once the economy picked back up, so did production
to some degree. But the hand carved carousel horses that

(21:09):
had been sort of this amazing art that was developing
were replaced by fiberglass and aluminum versions. No more steam
powered carousels were made, they had shifted over to electric. Yeah, definitely.
When I was a kid, the thing that we were
riding into County Fair was a fiber last carousel run
on electricity, and I was like, why are you making meatus?

(21:35):
But now as an adult, when I'm somewhere and I
see some like beautifully restored, handmade wooden carousel, I think
it's very lovely. Yeah, there are still some of those
hand carved beauties remaining, and the restoration projects have been
undertaken to keep a lot of them around. Yeah, some
of them are um mounted by you know, just private
people that sometimes start collecting carousel horses and then decided

(21:58):
they want to put carousels by together others who are
handled by companies. But in the last four decades, interesting
carousels and carousel horses as collectors items has really swelled,
Like in the nineteen seventies, sort of this kickoff just
happened where people started to become really into them again.
And unfortunately, part of the problem with keeping carousels going

(22:18):
is that in many cases it is more profitable to
sell off the amazing horses than it is to try
to keep a carousel running, they have to run at
a profit. There are also some interesting innovations and modern carousels.
Washington's National Zoo now has one that runs on solar power,
and all of the animals that are represented there are
endangered species, so it's in line with the Zoo's theme

(22:39):
of conservation. Uh So, if you love carousels, this is
our p s A. And you want to see them
stick around again. They have to operate in a way
that makes money and makes sense for them to keep going.
So go ride one. Seriously, if you have a local carousel,
go buy a ticket to ride, help keep it going,
visit off, and bring your friends. That's what's going to
keep this piece of history alive. And so now we're

(23:02):
gonna tie some things that we've talked about together with
the listener mail that Holly reference at the top of
the episode. Uh she or we both actually got this
email last year. So when we tell you that sometimes
it takes a while, uh I would say almost always
said almost always takes a while. Uh yeah, I mean

(23:23):
I wanna. I know we always say it, but I
do want to reassure people that even if we haven't
gotten to your request yet, we may or may not,
but we're trying to. So we're working through it. And
this is one of those things that I love the
second we got it, and then it just kind of
got back Bernard by other things for a while. So
and we also do read every single email that we get,

(23:44):
although we are not nearly as good about answering no. Well,
it's hard to keep up with as well as you know. Unfortunately,
the podcast is not our only job here, so there's
we're juggling some stuff. So I hope no one feels
slighted if they don't get a sill reply. We try
too as many as we can. But anyway, that's the story.
So this listener mail is from our listener Ashley, and

(24:06):
she says, hello, ladies. I love your podcast and I
laugh at your love affairs with delicious food in historical clothing,
both things I wish I knew more about. I have
a happy topic for you since you asked for them.
So recently my job I worked for the world's largest
manufacturer of wooden carousels, the Carousel Works, incorporated in Mansfield, Ohio.
This is site of the historic Ohio State Reformatory where

(24:29):
they filled in the Shawshank Redemption. Our carousels are handbuilt,
hand carved, and hand painted. We are one of the
few companies in the world that still does this. And
in addition to having a carousel in nearly every state
in the Union, we have a carousel in Canada to
in South Korea, and the only two carousels at sea
on cruise ships with Royal Caribbeans Oasis of the Seas
and Allure of the Seas. We're putting up our fifty

(24:51):
five new carousel later in our third in South Korea.
Right now, we are restoring the historic Euclid Beach Park
Rand carousel that was once located in Cleveland, Ohio, just
one in a long line of restorations we've taken part in.
It's also known as PTC Number nineteen. The Philadelphia Toboggan
Company was one of the premier carousel makers in the States,

(25:13):
and their name is tossed around with historic carvers such
as Eleon, Herschel, Spielman, dentzel, Loof, and Parker. Many of
the wood carvers were immigrants who came from Europe and
found work in the States. Many of these carousels were
richly decorated and painted. However, after the Great Depression, they
almost all went away and were replaced with a luminium fiberglass.
It was actually the Carousel Works that created the first

(25:34):
new hand carved carousel in to have been built since
the nineteen thirties, using an antique frame but all new figures,
murals and gears. I grew up riding that carousel. This
is a really cool part about her job. It's all cool,
but she says, I myself am a painter at the
Carousel Works, having painted figures and murals for almost three
years now. You can actually see my paint jobs on

(25:56):
a carousel near you at the Birmingham Sux. It's kind
of near a day trip maybe. Um. We built that
carousel in two thousand two and repainted the figures recently.
In I painted the clouded leopard and the jaguar. That
is the coolest thing actually, I actually cyberstocked her work
and went looking for pictures of the clouded leopard and

(26:16):
the jaguar at the Birmingham Zoo carousel and they're gorgeous.
It's so beautiful. I am so thankful for this listener
mail and the inspiration of it, because it's one of
those topics that it is really beautiful part of history,
and I always like supporting artists, and carousels are in
many cases amazing works of art. So I also kind
of want to return to the days where we played

(26:38):
a game of riding horses and throwing perfume at each other.
I would play that. Well, we can mount that as
our own game. Can have this sort of horrible office
game where we all smell like perfume. My thing is that,
you know, I would want it to be good perfume,
but that gets really expensive. We can just delete an oil.
That's what we'll do. They go. Thanks so much for

(27:09):
joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out
of the archive, if you heard an email address or
a Facebook U r L or something similar over the
course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our
current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio
dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no
longer works, and you can find us all over social

(27:31):
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(27:53):
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