The history of Hartford
Hartford's Barbour Street carries the memory of 1944, when the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus tent caught fire during a matinee and collapsed within minutes, killing at least 167 people. The ground has since held grief, inquiry, unrest and, now, plans to rebuild.
Barbour Street in Hartford, Connecticut, was the site of the 1944 Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus fire, which killed at least 167 people when the big top, waterproofed with gasoline-diluted paraffin, collapsed in flames within about ten minutes during a packed matinee performance.
The circus tent collapsed here in flames in minutes
The Hartford circus fire was one of the deadliest fire disasters in American history, and this site on Barbour Street is now home to a quiet memorial. On this ground that afternoon, Ringling Brothers packed as many as 7,000 people under its big top for a matinee show. The tent walls had been coated with paraffin wax dissolved in gasoline, a common waterproofing method at the time meant to keep the canvas dry. Instead it turned the tent into fuel.
A small flame appeared on the southwest sidewall while The Flying Wallendas performed overhead. The bandleader, Merle Evans, spotted it first and ordered the band into "The Stars and Stripes Forever," the tune circus crews used to signal an emergency. Ringmaster Fred Bradna tried to calm the crowd, but the fire had already knocked out the power, and his voice could not carry. Flaming wax began raining down from the roof as people scrambled for the exits.
Two of the main ways out were blocked by steel chutes used to move lions and tigers in and out of the ring. People pushed toward the gaps that remained, and some were trampled in the crush. Others jumped from the top of the bleachers, 15 feet down, rather than wait. The whole tent collapsed in under ten minutes, burying hundreds of people under burning canvas.
At least 167 people died that day, and more than 700 were hurt. Two out of every three victims were children. A circus worker named Robert Dale Segee later confessed to setting the fire, then took it back, and investigators never settled the question.
Five circus men were convicted, then pardoned
Five circus employees stood trial afterward on charges of involuntary manslaughter. George W. Smith and Leonard S. Aylesworth got two to seven years. James A. Haley got one to five. Edward R. Versteeg and William Caley got a year in jail, and David W. Blanchfield got six months. Governors later pardoned all five, and in 1954, Ringling Bros. And Barnum & Bailey paid victims' families a settlement of $5 million, worth close to $60 million today.
The circus had never told Hartford's fire department it was coming. The main exit was blocked that day, and crowds pushed toward whatever gap was left.
A worker confessed to arson, then took it back
A former lighting crew worker named Robert Dale Segee confessed to setting the fire in 1950, when he was twenty. He had been fourteen at the time of the blaze. Segee told investigators he'd seen a vision of an Indian on a flaming horse urging him to set fires. He later took the confession back. Doctors diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia, and the physical evidence never lined up with his story.
A memorial named the dead at the center ring
Six victims went unidentified for decades, among them a small girl known only as "Little Miss 1565." In 1991, an arson investigator named Rick Davey announced he had identified her as Eleanor Cook. The author Stewart O'Nan, who researched the fire for his book, disputed the claim. Five unidentified victims were buried at Northwood Cemetery in nearby Windsor.
In 2005, Hartford dedicated a memorial on this ground, behind the Fred D. Wish Elementary School. A bronze disk marks the exact spot where the center ring once stood, carrying the names and ages of the dead. Four granite benches sit around it, laid out like a ring of their own.
A schoolyard now covers the field where the tent stood
The city now holds this ground as school property, eighteen and a half acres zoned for mixed use and recorded under the Hartford Board of Education. No subdivision plat or private sale marks its passage from field to schoolyard. It has stayed public land since the fire, first as open ground and later as the site of Fred D. Wish Elementary and its memorial.
Barbour Street itself carried more grief in the years after. In 1968, fires and looting broke out along the street following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and parts of it never fully recovered. Shootings have continued to mark the street in recent years, including a fatal one in a back lot just steps from the school in February 2026.
The bronze disk and granite benches behind the school mark the exact center ring where the fire took its worst toll.
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