In 1881, Frank Drew – a protégé of famed showman P. T. Barnum – struck out on his own. Over the next few years, Drew brought Barnum’s signature sideshow style to several cities, including Cleveland.
More than 130 years after his death, Phineas Taylor (P. T.) Barnum remains a household word. Despite being a philanthropist, newspaper publisher, writer, legislator, and abolitionist, he is best remembered as a co-founder of the “Greatest Show on Earth,” a circus he didn’t launch until he was in his 60s. But long before that, at age 32, he birthed Barnum’s American Museum, a wildly popular mashup of live beasts, clowns, acrobats, jugglers, magicians, and musical acts. Less savory, but every bit as popular, were the museum’s human oddities—albinos, giants, little people, the physically malformed—as well as any number of hoax exhibits: a creature with the body of a monkey and the tail of a fish, a 10-foot human corpse, George Washington’s 161-year-old nursemaid. Located on Broadway in lower Manhattan, the museum’s outside was garnished with giant images of animals and other exhibits. From the roof, attendees could go aloft in a hot air balloon. To Barnum it was all about hot air. He was, after all, the godfather of hucksterism—the self-described “Prince of Humbugs.”
From its inception, Barnum’s creation was known as a “dime museum,” a live entertainment cousin of circuses, minstrel shows, music halls, burlesque and, eventually, vaudeville. In fact, many of vaudeville’s most famous names (Harry Houdini, the Griffin Sisters, Maggie Cline) began their careers in dime museums. Still, it was freaks and fakes that most likely attracted the masses. In his own way, Barnum also sought to educate the unwashed, to offer what he called a “moral education” proffered through lectures, concerts, and the importation of exotic (translation: “savage and inferior”) humans. This mission—concurrently enlightening, amusing, and horrifying audiences—was more or less unique to dime museums.
Barnum’s first connection to Cleveland came in November 1851, when he brought the uber-famous Swedish soprano Jenny Lind to Cleveland. More than one thousand people paid $4 (about $150 in today’s money) to see and hear her at Kelley’s Hall on Superior Street at the corner of Bank Street (now West 6th). By 1871, however, Barnum had a protégé—an adept and highly ambitious showman named Frank Drew. And it is because of Frank Drew that Cleveland got its first dime museum.
Frank M. Drew was born in New York City on June 30, 1852, and, like Barnum, seemed born for show business. An actor and circus performer, Drew was a cousin of theater legend John Drew Jr. and the eventual uncle of acting greats John, Ethel, and Lionel Barrymore. Drew’s father (also named Frank) was an actor who often performed at Cleveland’s Park Theater.
After splitting with Barnum in 1881, Drew opened his first dime museum in Providence, Rhode Island. By 1884, he had moved to Cleveland and opened Drew’s Dime Museum at 189 Superior Street, just east of Bank Street and around the corner from the Academy of Music. By the late 1880s, he would also launch dime museums in Columbus, Ohio, and Indianapolis.
Housed in the Commercial Building, a multi-use structure, Drew’s Cleveland museum was largely featureless on the outside. The interior, however, was ever so Barnumesque. A “thin dime” admitted enquiring Clevelanders who, upon reaching the building’s third floor, might come face to face with Felix Wehrle (“The Elastic Skin Man”), Eugene Ward (“The Footless Song-and-Dance Man”), Jo-Jo (“The Dog-Faced Man”), R. J. James (“The Ohio Fat Boy”), or even “The Fairy Dwarf Sisters.” Inert creatures—e.g., a two-headed cow—drew abundant stares. Drew also offered what was, at the time, mainstream entertainment: black-face (minstrel) acts, trained animals (generally old, toothless, and tired), and a variety of laugh generators. The Four Mortons, a popular family act, performed at the museum early in their careers, as did comedy legends Sam Bernard and Weber & Fields.
But true to dime museums’ dual mission, Drew also hosted plays, concerts, lectures, and other forms of what Walt Disney would later dub "edutainment." For example, Drew hawked displays of animals and exotic humans as “cultural explorations,” as well as living proof of westerners’ supposed superiority over “lowly beasts and primitive cultures.” Such attractions in this era of scientific racism included the February 1884 appearances of “Cetewayo’s Zulu Princess and Suite” and nine Australian Boomerang Throwers: “ferocious, treacherous, uncivilized cannibals and savages."
Fortunately, other forms of enrichment were less dubious: In August 1884, four of the seven survivors of the tragic 28-man Greely Expedition to Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic shared maps, curiosities, and stories. In January 1887, visitors were treated to a demonstration of clog dancing, followed by a concert featuring the Beethoven Quartet. And October 1889 brought to Drew’s a demonstration of shadowgraphs (silhouettes made by casting shadows from a bright light source) along with a visit from quarrelsome puppets Punch & Judy.
In late 1889, Drew closed his museum and became manager of the Star Theater on Euclid Avenue (opened two years earlier as The Columbia and now the site of PNC Center). In 1903, Drew also assumed management of the Cleveland’s Colonial Theater at Erie and Superior Streets. He eventually retired to Gerard, Pennsylvania, and later to St. Petersburg, Florida, dying in 1949 at the astonishing, stupendous, amazing, incredible age of 95 or 96.
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