What is a Dime Museum?

22 Oct 1893, Chicago Daily Inter Ocean
Kohl & Middleton S. Clark Street

What is a dime museum?  In this 1893 advertisement Mattie Lee Price, the Georgia Magnetic Girl is listed on the same venue as Harry Houdini (doing business as "the Houdin brothers, French illusionists.") Clear in the advertisement is "Kohl & Middleton's South Clark street ...dime museum."

Mattie and other performers such as Houdini, Joe Joe the dogface boy, the bearded lady and others with physical anomalies, musicians, dancers, animal acts, and such often worked in "dime museums" during the winter months when the circuses were repairing and resting up for the coming summer season.

Dime museums evolved when the need for more entertainment came about after the Civil War.  Once the locals had seen all the dusty old artifacts in a museum, they rarely came back to pay the entrance fee to come look at them again.  Thus, was born the "dime museum" with entertainment.  The acts had to be "tame" and "family friendly."  The goal was to change the entertainment very often and invite the public to come in, enjoy, stay as long as they wanted during the day and only charge one-thin-dime!

The acts like Houdini's and Mattie's would "jump" from one dime museum in one city to the next so as to present their entertainment to a new and curious audience.  Often the acts followed a circuit.  In 1893 Harry Houdini wrote about how he was on the same venue with Mattie Lee Price and her husband in Chicago.  Here Houdini talks about "jumping" to the next museum while giving his high praise to both Miss Price and her husband, W.W.White.

In "Miracle Mongers and Their Methods: A Complete Exposé of the Modus Operandi ..." Houdini wrote:

Some twenty-six years ago I was on the bill with Mattie Lee Price, who, though less well known, was in many ways superior to either Miss Hurst or Miss Abbott. For a time she was a sensation of the highest order, for which thanks were largely due to the management of her husband, a wonderful lecturer and a thorough showman. We worked together at Kohl and Middleton's, Chicago, and the following week at Burton's Museum, Milwaukee; but when we made the next jump I found that White was not along. They had a family squabble, the other apex of the triangle being a circus grafter who "shibboleth" at some of the "brace games," which at that time had police protection, so far as that could be given. The dime museum was an important step in the entertainment industry and is considered by many to be the birthplace of vaudeville. C. A. Bradenbaugh’s (dime) Museum Northwest corner of 9th and Arch Streets 1890 (Free Library of Philadelphia For more information on Dime Museums, I highly recommend "Weird Wonderful.  The Dime Museum in America," by Andrea Stulman Dennett.  It is a wonderfully well-researched book and although chock full of facts, very easy to read.   Mattie Lee Price, The Forgotten Georgia Wonder grew up in the dime museums in America.  To read more about her, you can find her on  Amazon, Barnes & Nobel, Wikipedia and more.