In February 1863, New York society was thrown into a frenzy over a wedding that seemed to capture the public imagination like few others. The couple were two of the most famous performers in America: Lavinia Warren, a woman with proportionate dwarfism who stood just 2 feet 8 inches tall, and Charles Stratton, known worldwide as General Tom Thumb. The ceremony took place at Grace Church, with as many as 10,000 people either attending or crashing the event. Reports described a city where women dressed an hour and a half early just to catch a glimpse of the proceedings.

The New York Times covered the affair in exhaustive detail, marveling at the two liliputians whose nuptials had caused such a tremendous hubbub in the feminine world of New York. Afterward, the celebrations moved to the Metropolitan Hotel, where the showman P. T. Barnum sold tickets for the reception.

Lavinia Warren had not set out to become a spectacle. Born Mercy Lavinia Warren Bump in Middleborough, Massachusetts, in 1841, she grew up in a family of average height and healthy children. But Lavinia, and later her younger sister Minnie, stopped growing in childhood due to a pituitary disorder. She remained small but intelligent, becoming a schoolteacher at sixteen.

Her entry into show business was almost accidental. A cousin invited her to travel west to the Mississippi River, where she discovered the invitation had a hidden purpose: a local showman was running a museum of living wonders and wanted her to join. Lavinia agreed, performing as the Liliputian Queen, a reference to the tiny people of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. In 1862, Barnum, the foremost manager of such shows in America, heard of her and sent an agent to recruit her for his American Museum in Manhattan.

Lavinia, drawn by higher pay, moved to New York. She sang, danced, and mingled with crowds, quickly becoming a fan favorite. Among the other performers was General Tom Thumb, whose real name was Charles Sherwood Stratton. He had been performing with Barnum since childhood and was already one of the most famous people in America.

Tom courted Lavinia, though not without competition from another small performer, Commodore Nutt, who had loved her first. Nutt once knocked Tom out in a fight, but Tom ultimately won Lavinia’s affections. Her mother initially disapproved, but Tom’s promise to continue performing full-time convinced Lavinia to accept his proposal. The marriage made them one of the most celebrated couples in the country.

Shortly after their wedding, they visited the White House, where President Abraham Lincoln received them in the midst of the Civil War. When Lincoln asked Tom for advice on ending the fighting, Tom reportedly replied that Lincoln should ask Barnum, who had managed to bring their show to a close in under a month. The couple then embarked on a three-year European tour, meeting Emperor Napoleon III, King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy, and Pope Pius IX. They traveled as far as British India before returning home, having amassed a considerable fortune.

But there were darker aspects to their fame. Lavinia was often treated like a child by the public, who wanted to hold or pet her, and Barnum encouraged this image even as she aged into her thirties. She continued to perform, saying, I belong to the public. In the years that followed, as public interest in the couple waned, photos of them with a baby were released, igniting renewed excitement.

Lavinia toured the country presenting the child as her own. But the truth was far more troubling. Barnum and his team would secure a baby from a local orphanage before each show, present it to the crowds, and return it afterward. The story was invented that the child had died of brain inflammation at age two, and many historians accepted this fabrication for years.

In reality, Lavinia never had children, worried that her small size would make childbirth fatal. Tragedy mounted in her later years. In 1878, her sister Minnie died in her arms from complications after childbirth, as did her baby girl hours later. In January 1883, Lavinia and Tom were caught in a hotel fire in Wisconsin; their small size made it easy for firefighters to carry them to safety, but the blaze killed at least seventy people.

Six months later, Tom died of a stroke at forty-five, the years of hard living having taken their toll. Lavinia was devastated and financially strained. Tom’s taste for luxury and lavish spending had squandered much of their wealth, leaving her with a modest inheritance and the need to return to work. She partnered with Count Primo Magri, an Italian dwarf who had performed with her and Tom for years.

The two married in 1885 in the same church where Lavinia and Tom had wed. Their union lasted thirty-four years, though it was often troubled by spending habits and mutual infidelity. By the early twentieth century, the heyday of freak shows was fading, and moving pictures were drawing audiences away. Lavinia and the Count appeared in a 1915 silent film, The Liliputian’s Courtship, one of the first motion pictures to feature dwarf performers.

It was her final notable performance. She died in 1919 in Middleborough at the age of seventy-eight, a remarkably long life for the era, and was buried beside Tom. Another performer who rose to fame under Barnum was Anna Swan, born in 1846 in Nova Scotia. She grew rapidly from infancy, standing 4 feet 8 inches tall by age five and eventually reaching 7 feet 11 inches.

Her condition, gigantism, went undiagnosed at the time. She was intelligent, well-read, and wanted to be a teacher, but constant staring and ridicule made that impossible. In 1862, Barnum offered her a position, which her deeply religious parents refused. But Anna, now miserable at her school, eventually accepted Barnum’s offer herself.

She negotiated favorable terms: a weekly salary, a chaperon, and a tutor. She was billed as the tallest woman in the world. Anna nearly died in 1865 when fire swept through Barnum’s museum in New York. Trapped on the third floor, her enormous size prevented her from climbing through a window.

Other performers guided her to a loft, where the window was widened; eighteen men used ropes and blocks and tackles to lower her to safety. She survived, though she lost everything, and was present when Barnum’s new museum burned down in 1868 as well. In 1871, en route to a European tour, Anna met Martin Van Buren Bates, known as the Kentucky Giant. He stood 7 feet 9 inches tall and weighed around 470 pounds.

Romance blossomed, and they married in London at St. Martin-in-the-Fields. They toured Europe as the tallest couple in the world, then retired to a farm in Ohio. Martin built a house with doors 8 1/2 feet high so neither of them would bump their heads.

Their happiness was shattered when Anna gave birth in 1872 to an 18-pound stillborn daughter. Six years later, she gave birth to a son weighing nearly 24 pounds, the largest newborn ever recorded. He died after eleven hours. Anna never became pregnant again.

One of the most curious aspects of Anna’s life was her friendship with Queen Victoria. The queen had met Anna during an early tour and the two struck up a rapport. When Victoria learned of Anna’s engagement, she ordered a royal gown for her and possibly arranged for the wedding at St. Martin’s.

Afterward, Anna and Martin visited Buckingham Palace, where Victoria gifted Anna a diamond ring and Martin a gold pocket watch. When their son died, the queen wrote to express her condolences. Anna died in 1888, the day before her forty-second birthday, leaving an estate worth the modern equivalent of several million dollars. Martin, who died in 1919, was buried beside her and their infant son.

Born into slavery in North Carolina in 1851, Millie and Christine McCoy were conjoined twins, connected at the lower back and spine. Their parents were enslaved by Alexander McKay. When they were ten months old, McKay sold them to a man named John Pervis, on the condition their mother stay with them. A year later, they were sold again for the enormous sum of ten thousand dollars.

Their new owner exhibited them as the Carolina Twins, displaying the infant girls across the South. While touring in New Orleans, a supposed buyer offered forty-five thousand dollars for them, then vanished with the girls, stealing them away. They were displayed in Philadelphia and at Barnum’s American Museum in Manhattan before being taken to England. In 1857, after a three-year search, their mother and Joseph Smith, their legal owner, traveled to Liverpool and reclaimed them.

But the reunion with their mother did not mean a new life. They were put back to work, exhibited across the United Kingdom and later in America. When the Civil War ended slavery, Millie and Christine gained a measure of autonomy. They toured extensively, performing duets that delighted audiences, and by their twenties had earned enough to partially retire.

They bought the plantation where they had been born and gave it to their father, later building a large house on the property. They helped fund a local school for black girls and supported several colleges, often anonymously. They died in 1912, within hours of each other, from tuberculosis, not from complications of being conjoined. Their gravestone reads: A soul with two thoughts, two hearts that beat as one.

Annie Jones was born in Virginia in 1865 with a mustache already visible. Her condition, likely hypertrichosis, caused excessive hair growth across her face and body. Barnum heard of the infant with a beard and recruited her when she was just nine months old, billing her as Infant Esau after the biblical figure noted for his hairiness. Her parents were poor and agreed to Barnum’s offer of a weekly fee.

Over the years, Annie became one of the most famous bearded ladies in America, her hair eventually growing six feet long. In 1880, she married Richard Elliot, a circus barker, against her parents’ wishes. The marriage lasted fifteen years. After their divorce, she married William Donovan, another barker, and the couple left Barnum’s circus to perform on their own.

Donovan died four years later, and Annie rejoined the circus. She spent her final years campaigning against the use of the word freak to describe such shows. She died in 1902, likely of tuberculosis, at just thirty-seven years old. Josephine Myrtle Corbin was born in Tennessee in 1868 with a rare condition called dipygus, a form of caudal duplication syndrome.

She had two pelvises side by side, with four legs. Her outer legs were normal and strong; her inner legs were smaller and weaker, with only three toes each. Her father began charging neighbors a dime to see her when she was a month old. In the early 1880s, at thirteen, she joined a sideshow, billed as the Four-Legged Girl from Texas.

At the height of her fame in the 1890s and 1900s, she earned up to four hundred fifty dollars a week. Despite her condition, she married James Clinton Bicknell at nineteen. She gave birth to five children, with pregnancies occurring in both of her pelvises. She died in 1928 from a streptococcal skin infection, a condition easily treated with antibiotics today.

Because of fears that her body would be exhumed for display, her grave was filled with concrete, and her family held a vigil until it dried.