Raw States
Baraboo's Big Top Parade
Baraboo, WI · Arts & Culture
- When
- June 12, 2027
- Where
- Downtown Baraboo · Baraboo · WI
- Cost
- Not confirmed
- Status
- Approximate: based on past editions, not announced yet
Baraboo honors its history as the birthplace of the Ringling Bros. Circus with a downtown parade of vintage circus wagons, calliope music, and costumed performers each June. The tradition traces to 1963, and the 2026 parade drew more than 20,000 spectators. (2027 dates approximate.)
The history within reach
- Baraboo's Big Top Paradesame spot
Baraboo honors its history as the birthplace of the Ringling Bros.
Ringling Brothers winter quarters has five brothers from Baraboo built the largest circus in the world and wintered it here for thirty-four years.
A lake with no inlet or outlet, dammed at both ends by glacial moraine between 500-foot bluffs of 1.6-billion-year-old quartzite.
The Army condemned about seven thousand acres of Sauk County farmland in 1942 and put up a plant to make smokeless propellant, which ran through the Second World War, then Korea, then Vietnam, and employed enormous numbers of people in a place that had none of that before.
Fifty feet high, a hundred and twenty wide, three hundred tons of salvage in a field off Highway 12: two Edison dynamos from the 1880s, lightning rods, power-plant parts, scrap from the ammunition works down the road, and the decontamination chamber the Apollo 11 crew sat in.