P.T. Barnum and the 1936 Bridgeport Commemorative Half Dollar

There are few figures as famous and enduring in American pop culture as Phineas Taylor Barnum, an American showman and politician better known as P.T. Barnum. Born in 1810, he became a man unlike any that American history has brought us before or since.

Yet Barnum was more than a circus legend, acclaim he saw only later in his life after founding the Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth in 1870 with circus magnate James A. Bailey. In 1919, many years after the deaths of both Barnum and Bailey, the Ringling Brothers purchased the Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth and merged that production with their own in 1919 to form the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus brand more familiar with audiences of late