COVER STORY
Her feats as a circus performer drew worldwide
acclaim. But when it came to leaving the spotlight it
was to the Treasure Coast that Lucia Zora retreated
Lucia Zora, who spent her career traveling throughout the United States and
retired to Fort Pierce, gives a wave while aboard her favorite elephant, Snyder.
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ucia Zora’s life was the stuff of legends.
She might have been an Annie Oakley, or a Sarah
Bernhardt — the ultimate female celebrities of her day
— had her life gone a bit differently. In her time,
she was famous, a celebrated circus performer
billed as “the bravest woman in the world.” Daily,
for more than a decade, she cast her fate in the cage, boldly
bringing together lions and tigers in her famed wild animal
act or balancing on the tusks of an elephant as it danced on
its hind legs across the ring, mesmerizing the crowds.
CHECKERED LIFE
But, at the height of her celebrity, Lucia Zora retreated from
her life under the Big Top to the Colorado wilderness. She
sought solitude, and she certainly found it, but that life was
harder and more lonely than she had expected.
So the woman known to the world as Lucia Zora left the
wilderness and finally ended up in the house her parents had
built on the banks of the Indian River south of Fort Pierce.
There she lived out her life as a proper housewife, far from
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Zora’s parents, Milton and Myra Card, built this home on the banks of the Indian River, completing it in 1914. Zora would spend her last years there until
her death in 1936.