Renovation of Wisconsin bar leads to discovery of massive 140-year-old circus art

    DURAND, Wisconsin (WCCO) -- Wisconsin bars are known for their pints and their patrons. About the last thing you'd expect to discover in such a place would be 55 feet of historic American artwork.

"I was really surprised once we took all the electrical plate covers and seen it went the whole length of the wall," said Ron Berger. "Curiosity for sure, like, 'What is under here?'"

It was 2015 and Berger was renovating the Corral Bar and Riverside Grill in Durand to add a banquet room. Nearly the second he went to work, something caught his eye.

"When I cut this doorway through and I run into this buffalo charging at me," Berger said. "All the time, what the heck is under here? Because we had no idea."

As he tore down more of the wall, he discovered the buffalo was part of a hidden circus billboard from Aug. 17, 1885. The circus had elephants, giraffes, lions and even sea creatures, allegedly.

The menagerie of animals and performers was brought together by one man: Miles Orton, one of the greatest showmen ever.

Berger knows all about Orton now, but it initially took some digging. After making this unlikely discovery, he contacted a historian at Circus World in Baraboo.

"They were digging into it for weeks and couldn't find nothing," he said.

Then one night Berger stumbled upon a website that told him everything he needed to know about Orton, including the fact that he brought his great Anglo-American Circus to town in the 1880s.

Orton's circus performers likely put the giant poster on the side of the building for all to see; visible from the street, the train station and even from the river.

"This would be like the Super Bowl ad of the day," he said. "The more I kept learning, the more, 'We got to save this.' It was just, like I said, almost divine."

For 10 straight 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 scrap-booking paste to glue parts of the mural back onto the wood.

After Berger got a good deal on a glass wall, he went from preserving the past to displaying it. And that's when a different kind of circus came to town, with curious sightseers from well beyond Dairyland.

"They've come from Russia, China, all over the place. I mean, Malaysia, you look through the book, France," he said.

"We go over there to see all their castles and stuff, so why shouldn't somebody 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 believes they can spend all day looking at the giant poster from the past and still not see everything.

"When you see people respond to it, if you go through the comments in the book, no, it gives you goosebumps. Because it's part of history that's long forgotten. There's just not much example of this out there," he said.

In addition to being 55 feet long, the poster is 9 feet high. It took Berger and others about two years to fully restore the poster. It's also known as a lithograph, which means it was made by stamping carved woodblocks onto paper.