DURAND, Wis. — Wisconsin bars are known for their pints and their customers. About the last thing you would expect to discover in such a place would be 55 feet of historic American artwork.
“I was really surprised when we grabbed all the electrical panel covers and saw that they went the entire length of the wall,” Ron Berger said. “Of course it’s curiosity, like, ‘What’s underneath?'”
It was 2015 and Berger was renovating the Corral Bar and Riverside Grill in Durand to add a banquet room. Almost as he was leaving for work, something caught his eye.
“When I cut through this doorway and I came across this buffalo charging towards me,” Berger said. “All the time, what’s underneath all this? Because we had no idea.”
While tearing down more of the wall, he discovered that the buffalo was part of a hidden circus billboard from August 17, 1885. The circus had elephants, giraffes, lions and even sea creatures, reportedly.
The menagerie of animals and performers was brought together by one man: Miles Orton, one of the greatest showmen ever.
Berger now knows all about Orton, but it took some digging initially. After making this unlikely discovery, he contacted a historian at Circus World in Baraboo.
“They were digging in there for weeks and couldn’t find anything,” he said.
Then one evening Berger came across a website that told him everything he needed to know about Orton, including the fact that he brought his big Anglo-American Circus to town in the 1880s.
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Orton’s circus performers probably hung the giant poster on the side of the building for everyone to see; visible from the street, the train station and even from the river.
“This would be the Super Bowl ad of the day,” he said. “The more I kept learning, the more, ‘We have to save this.’ It was just, like I said, almost divine.”
For ten days, a local artist and others used distilled water and cotton balls to clean the mural and bring it back to life.
They also had to use a simple scrapbook paste to glue parts of the mural back onto the wood.
After getting a good deal on a glass wall, Berger went from preserving the past to displaying it. And then a different kind of circus came to town, bringing curious visitors from far beyond Dairyland.
“They come from Russia, China, everywhere. I mean, Malaysia, just look through the book, France,” he said.
“We go there to see all their castles and stuff, so why wouldn’t someone come here and see something unique that we have?” said visitor Pam Biesterveld.
For this Wisconsin bar, the show must go on. Visitors are always welcome, and Berger thinks they could look at the giant poster from the past all day and still not see everything.
“When you see people react to it, when you go through the comments in the book, no, it gives you goosebumps. Because it’s a part of history that has been long forgotten. There just aren’t many examples of this,” he said .
The poster is not only 17.5 meters long, but also 9 meters high. It took Berger and others about two years to completely restore the poster. It is also called litho, which means it is made by stamping cut wood blocks onto paper.
