The late Jimmy Bashline of Butler shared his love for the circus with the “Jay Bee Miniature Circus,” a model housed in his garage. Bashline documented through photographs the 1954 visit to Butler of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

The late Jimmy Bashline expressed his gigantic love for the circus in a dazzlingly miniature way.

Bashline, who lived in Butler, created the “Jay Bee Miniature Circus,” a model that he would display at various sites around town.

The circus consisted of miniatures that were replicas of what Bashline spent his life going to see, and included an elephant shooting real water from its trunk.

“In all those years he took the memories he had and went and talked to performers and things like that,” said Aryl Bashline, his daughter. “He put many of the things in his circus.”

This included acts from Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, which Bashline saw when it came to Butler in 1954.

“He was just thrilled he was there,” Aryl Bashline said.

Jimmy Bashline had a lifelong love of the arts. He began drawing at age 5, and studied art with Eleanor Green in Butler during grade school. He worked as a sign painter at Troutman's department store before beginning his own sign-painting business in 1948.

Bashline, a World War II veteran, belonged to groups including the Circus Model Builders, Associated Artists of Butler County and the Butler County Historical Society.

He passed away in 2008 at age 90. His circus is now in the hands of the Butler County Historical Society.