The Unsettling Story of a Florida City and a $311 Death: John Ringling

On December 2, 1936, John Ringling died in New York with $311 in his bank account, four years after his own board voted him out of the circus that carried his name. He had built a fortune near $50 million and spent much of it dredging an entire stretch of Sarasota, Florida into existence. Ringling and his four older brothers built the Ringling Brothers Circus out of Baraboo, Wisconsin, in 1884, then bought their largest rival, Barnum & Bailey, in 1907. John, the youngest, became the operation's financial mind. He married Mable Burton in 1905, and by 1909 the couple were wintering in Sarasota, where they began dredging the bay's barrier islands into buildable land with developer Owen Burns, building the first causeway to the mainland and giving it to the city, laying out St. Armands Circle, and raising Ca d'Zan, a 56-room Venetian Gothic palace on Sarasota Bay, alongside a museum for the European Old Masters Ringling collected across the Atlantic. In 1929, after losing his usual exhibition date at Madison Square Garden, Ringling bought five rival circuses in a single afternoon for $1.7 million, borrowed against half his own circus stock. Mable died that same year. A second marriage, to Emily Haag Buck, ended in 1936 in what papers at the time called the costliest divorce Florida had ever recorded. A missed $18,000 interest payment, signed while Ringling was running a 104-degree fever, put his pledged stock into his creditors' hands, and in 1932 the board voted him out of the company that carried his own name. He died with $311 left and an estate valued on paper near $23.5 million, a fortune his creditors and the State of Florida fought over in court for a decade before the mansion, the museum, and the art collection he had willed to Florida's people were secured. Florida State University has operated the estate as the State Art Museum of Florida since 2000. Empire of Acres investigates the families and empires that built their power on American land and American labor, and what happened when the foundations shifted beneath them. #JohnRingling #Sarasota #FloridaHistory #CircusHistory #RinglingMuseum #AmericanHistory Copyright & Fair Use Notice This video is a non-commercial, educational history documentary produced for research and for purposes of commentary, critique, and analysis. Certain archival photographs and video clips appear here under the Fair Use doctrine (Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act), including use for commentary and criticism, news reporting, instruction, scholarship, and research.