I’m adding a new person to my Hippodrome cast of characters. Frank Melville was the first equestrian director of the Hippodrome. He was on my list for a little while, but I struck out when I did some initial research. There was another Frank Melville who booked fairground entertainments around that time, and I guess I had a hard time separating the two. (Always happy to have someone with a unique name!) But looking back over my research this summer, I became more interested in one act that he trained people for (an equestrian ballet that was eventually canceled). So I decided to pursue him through the digital archives just a bit more.
“How the Girl Riders Rehearsing for the Performances at Hippodrome Are Taught,” The Evening World 12/8/1904, page 4.
So here’s the beginning of my chunk on Frank Melville, with footnotes included. The rest of it is more narrative, but this was just my bio sketch information dump:
Frank Melville was well known in the New York Hippodrome’s early days as a skilled bareback rider, animal trainer, and an amateur historian of circus traditions. Melville was born September 16, 1854. [i] In the third generation of performing family, his first memory was he and his younger brother George being strapped to ponies – “tied on” as monkeys are – and sent around the arena.[ii] As a child, Frank Melville first rode in his father’s arms and then on his shoulders. During the Civil War his family toured in a circus showboat on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers: his obituary emphasized that the Melvilles performed for U.S. and Confederate troops in turn.[iii] Melville became an expert bareback rider, known as the first to somersault from the ground to a galloping horse. He traveled widely, performing in Australia, South America, and Europe. In Moscow in 1885, his wire walker wife Louise gave birth to a son named Colin. Melville took a break from circus life around the turn of the century to run a riding school in Kentucky. The Melvilles bought a house in St. Augustine, Florida and stayed there during the winter. In 1904 Melville returned to Barnum and Bailey’s where he had performed, this time as equestrian director. That job lasted for a season: at the age of fifty, he was hired away by Thompson and Dundy to train horses at the Hippodrome and Luna Park.
[i] Biographical information taken from William Lawrence Slout, Olympians of the Sawdust Circle: A Biographical Dictionary of the Nineteenth Century American Circus (Wildside Press LLC, 1998), 203.
[ii] “The Circus of the Old Days: Frank Melville Tells About the Changes,” The Sun, April 3, 1904.
[iii] Like most of the Hippodrome material related to the Civil War, Melville’s obituary was published during a period when reconciliation between white Northerners and Southerners was seen as a valuable part of the national project and took precedence over the experiences and emotions of African Americans. Performing for both sides was presumably meant to show that the Melvilles were fair-minded and wouldn’t let politics interfere with their performance before paying customers. That attitude is ahistorical, though, since circuses appealed to the allegiances of their audience, changing out “Yankee Doodle” for “Dixie,” altering punchlines to jokes, and the like. Civil War Circuses Beloved by Blue and Gray Audiences,” HistoryNet, May 12, 2020, https://www.historynet.com/civil-war-circuses/.
So that’s where he starts. I’m trying to think about the book’s structure in a new way. More info coming soon about that!