The Strange Tale of the Beautiful Library and the Town That Never Asked for It
Henry H. Gardiner, nicknamed The Human Fly (he claimed Grover Cleveland gave him the diminutive title), drew the largest crowds ever seen in every city he visited. From 1905 until the mid-1920s, he was a hamming-it-up showman who scaled more than 700 buildings without any equipment, sometimes in a suit and dress shoes but often dressed in white so the throngs below could pick him out.
He scaled state capitols, newspaper headquarters, and triumphal arches. And on Aug. 11, 1920, crowds gathered to watch him scale an elegant copper-clad onion dome—in a small town in the northern Shenandoah Valley.
“Why here?” is the question anybody visiting from afar that day likely would have asked. But they wouldn’t have been directing it at Gardiner. Traveling showmen went to towns big and small and he was there to raise money for the American Legion.