Cottage Cages

I'm going to be looking into the cottage cages, their rise and fall if you will, their creative development, their circus owners and their demise as one of the CHS Convention presentations. While the John Robinson 10 Big Shows is renowned in the circus world for the most elaborate configurations of all the cottage roofed vessels, they weren't the only ones to have them and they weren't the first ones either. They did have the BEST and the MOST however.

One of the hardest things in doing a research project like this is acquiring every photo that you can find, sorting out what you have and don't have, and then wondering what's out there you never even knew about. The study of these vessels has been greatly enhanced with the discovery of a couple postcards showing different angles, a couple different wagons on other shows to a huge find on eBay when one of the John Robinson cages was found in a photo that had not been found before. This picture was taken on the John Robinson 10 Big Shows. It was part of the Richard Conover collection.

If any of the readers has any cottage roofed vessels in their photo collections ( doesn't have to be a cage ) could you please share with me your photos for this presentation and eventual Bandwagon article? Naturally whoever sends anything gets all the credits. Feel free to email me at 5Tigeract@gmail.com