The Circus Building is an exhibit building at Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont. It houses a collection of circus posters, Gustav A. Dentzel Carousel animals, and elaborately carved miniature circuses, including those by Roy Arnold and Edgar Kirk. History In the 1950s the Shelburne Museum conceived of the design for the Circus Building, completed in 1965, to meet the requirements of exhibiting the Roy Arnold miniature circus. Traversing the grand hallway of the large horseshoe-shaped, spruce and cedar structure gives the impression of walking through the entire concourse of a circus parade. Outside, the large boulders that form the building's foundation accentuate the structure's dramatic shape and serve as the backdrop for the Daylily Garden, planted in 2008. Collection Carousel figures Although the carousel was invented in Europe, it reached its fullest development in the United States between 1870 and 1930. during this time, elaborate carousels became fixtures of the new city parks built for a public with increasing amounts of leisure time and disposable income. Hundreds of park carousels were built by highly skilled woodcarvers and painters, while an even greater number of smaller, portable carousels were made for use at country fairs and carnivals. Shelburne Museum owns examples of both types of carousels: a small, portable machine operates outside the Circus Building, while the animals, chariots and painted panels from a part carousel manufactured by the Gustav Dentzel Company of Philadelphia are exhibited inside the Circus Building. Figures by a number of other manufacturers, both European and American, also are exhibited in the Circus building. The German-born Dentzel opened America's first carousel business in 1867. Dentzel's shop produced the most realistic and graceful of all carousel animals; his carvers paid enormous attention to anatomical detail, and his painters rendered every nuance of the animals' coloration. Shelburne Museum's Dentzels are from a forty-animal carousel completed about 1902. The three-row machine carried twenty-nine horses and four chariots; menagerie figures include three giraffes, three goats, three deer, a lion and a tiger. The figures were finish-carved by Daniel Muller, the most skilled of Dentzel's craftspeople. All the animals are in their original factory paint; this is almost unheard of for carousel figures, because most carousels were repainted frequently as part of routine maintenance. Several of the figures have recently been conserved; layers of discolored, non-original linseed oil were removed to reveal the richly colored and complex paint patterns applied by Dentzel's