Millie and Christine McCoy were born on July 11, 1851, on a plantation near Whiteville, North Carolina, into slavery. Their parents, Jacob and Monimia McCoy, were enslaved by a man named Alexander McKay, and the family carried his surname. The twins arrived joined at the lower back and spine by cartilage, sharing some vital body parts but not others. They reportedly weighed a combined seventeen pounds at birth, and word of their unusual condition spread quickly through the region.
In the nineteenth century, conjoined twins were poorly understood, and curiosity seekers began showing up at the McKay farm to see them. Alexander McKay grew irritated by the disruption, and when the girls were just ten months old, he sold them to a man named John C. Pervis, on the condition that their mother could stay with them. That arrangement did not last long.
About a year later, the twins were sold again, this time to a man named Brower, who, with financial backing from Joseph P. Smith, paid the staggering sum of ten thousand dollars for them, a fortune equivalent to roughly four hundred thousand dollars today. With profit in mind, Brower began exhibiting the infant girls as a medical marvel under the name the Carolina Twins, traveling across the Southern states, including Louisiana, Texas, and North Carolina. In October 1853, Millie and Christine made headlines at North Carolina’s first official state fair, which drew daily crowds of around five thousand people.
Some doubted their condition, suspecting a hoax, so while in New Orleans for another show, Brower had local doctors examine the girls and confirm that they were genuine conjoined twins. Life on display was grueling. The girls were often separated from their mother and, though they could not understand it at the time, subjected to public ridicule. As toddlers, they were uncoordinated and clumsy, finding it difficult to walk and often falling over.
In time, though, they developed a distinctive sideways walk that eventually turned into a charming dance that delighted audiences, a rare moment of joy in lives otherwise marked by hardship and exploitation. While touring in New Orleans, Brower received an offer he could not refuse: forty-five thousand dollars for the twins, a sum equivalent to over 1. 8 million dollars today. He eagerly accepted, but the deal was too good to be true.
Brower had been swindled, and Millie and Christine were gone, stolen away by the supposed buyer. The twins vanished from public view until 1854, when they reappeared at a museum in Philadelphia. Bitter disputes raged over their ownership. Brower, Joseph P.
Smith, and even Alexander McKay, who seemed to regret selling the twins for a comparatively meager sum, all laid claim to them. Their mother, Monimia, fought to have her daughters returned to her care in some form. The scam left Brower broke and out of the picture, and Smith emerged as the twins’ legal owner. He spared no expense in recovering them, hiring a private investigator to track Millie and Christine.
Meanwhile, their kidnappers had moved north, placing the twins on display at P. T. Barnum’s famed American Museum in Manhattan. The twins next appeared in Canada before being taken across the Atlantic to Liverpool, England.
By that point, Millie and Christine had spent the vast majority of their young lives far from home and family. In 1857, after a grueling three-year search, the private investigator finally tracked them to England. Their mother, Monimia, and their enslaver, Joseph P. Smith, traveled to Liverpool to reclaim them.
In Birmingham, the twins, now about five and a half years old, were reunited with their mother. It was a bittersweet moment. Millie and Christine had spent most of their short lives in the hands of kidnappers, exploited as curiosities for profit. Yet even after being rescued, their lives did not change all that much.
They were promptly put back to work, exhibited once again for the public in the United Kingdom and later in the United States, continuing their lives as a spectacle for others’ entertainment. This was how Millie and Christine’s lives played out as they grew up. Things changed in 1860 when Abraham Lincoln won the U. S.
presidential election. Within weeks, South Carolina seceded from the Union, quickly followed by a wave of Southern states, including the twins’ home state of North Carolina. By the first half of 1861, the nation was plunged into the American Civil War. By then, the girls were living in North Carolina again, splitting their time between the household of the Smiths, time spent with their biological parents, and touring across the Southern states.
The chaos of the war restricted the twins’ movements but also opened the door for their education. Despite being slaveholders, it was reported that the Smiths treated Millie and Christine fairly well. Joseph’s wife even broke the law by teaching the girls to read and write, a bold act at the time. They also learned to speak several languages and received professional training in singing, which would later define their careers.
Joseph Smith passed away during the war, leaving behind an estate that included over thirty slaves. Despite his death, Millie and Christine remained enslaved under the Smith family, but as the Civil War came to an end, freedom finally arrived. The twins, along with their parents, siblings, and countless others across the South, were liberated as slavery was abolished in the United States. With the war ended and as they entered their teenage years, Millie and Christine were able to tour again, and with a greater degree of autonomy than had previously been the case.
This was an era when circuses, or what were then cruelly known as freak shows, were at their height. Showmen like P. T. Barnum managed troupes of individuals who displayed medical anomalies, from giants and dwarves to bearded ladies, people with extra limbs, and much more.
In an age before television and radio, curiosity often outweighed sympathy, and crowds flocked to circuses and local fairs whenever they came to town. Millie and Christine performed all over the country and were a big hit at these shows. During this time, there was widespread fascination with conjoined twins, often referred to as Siamese twins, a term that stemmed from the famous conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker, who were born in Siam, modern-day Thailand. At times, Millie and Christine were displayed without any infringement of modesty to prove they were truly conjoined, satisfying the public’s curiosity while maintaining a sense of decorum.
As they toured, sometimes associated with Barnum’s shows, sometimes with other managers, they grew more experienced at managing their affairs. A memoir was written by them at the end of the 1860s in which they used the motto “As God decreed, we agreed,” indicating an acceptance of their unusual medical situation and a determination to make the best of it. Before long, they returned to Europe and, like many other popular circus performers of the time, met with Queen Victoria. A highlight of their performance was their duets, where the sisters would sing together or alternate, with Christine taking a verse and Millie the chorus, or vice versa.
Many of these songs would later be published in a lengthy booklet detailing their life and career. Many descriptions were written of Millie and Christine during these years, and the language used in them would not even be contemplated today. One such work, entitled “A Biographical Sketch of Millie Christine, the Carolina Twin, surnamed the Two-Headed Nightingale and the Eighth Wonder of the World,” referred to the twins as a “creature” and referenced them elsewhere as a singular girl, as though the writer were unaware that conjoined twins were two different people. Another unfortunate advertisement of the girls’ arrival in Liverpool in 1871 referred to them as cargo arriving on a ship, remarking that there had arrived a cargo which, in the words of Mr.
Tuell, might be termed most extraordinary. The report went on: “Here we have a young lady with one body but two distinct minds, born by two separate heads. All the intelligent men who saw her at the Washington Hotel the other day can bear witness to the marvelous intelligence which predominates in both brains. The conversational powers of the two heads at once in communication with two different persons upon different topics would sufficiently testify it.
But the marvel did not stop here. Some of the sweetest duets in the language of music were sung by a high soprano and a pure contralto, the notes issued from two heads and yet but one trunk supplied the nerve. ” Others simply engaged in fairly idiotic jokes. The Cincinnati Inquirer quipped that the two-headed girl would be a good juror, since she could look at both sides of the case at the same time.
These remarks, while mocking, highlighted the incredible fame they achieved. Millie and Christine could be viewed as victims of a world that treated them as a freak show, and this was certainly part of their reality. However, at the same time, performers like them who worked for Barnum and other circuses were handsomely rewarded if they were savvy enough to capitalize on their popularity. They could make a lot of money and retire comfortably.
Millie and Christine were able to make an estimated twenty-five thousand dollars per year working on the county fair circuit in America, while larger shows in the cities or trips to Europe held out the possibility of even greater earnings. This was a huge amount of money in the 1870s, particularly during an era of financial crisis in the United States, the so-called Long Depression of 1873 to 1879. With their earning power and a deflated market, they turned the disadvantage that had characterized their lives on its head and made the best of their situation. In the 1870s, they bought the McKay plantation where they had been born over twenty years earlier and gave it to their father.
They acquired the farm themselves after his death and built a large fourteen-room house where they lived with their many extended family members. By their twenties, Millie and Christine had earned enough money to partially retire. Like other circus performers of the time, years of successful touring, typically five to ten, allowed them to amass enough wealth to live comfortably, often with household staff to assist them. If money started to run low, they could return to touring for one or two seasons, earning a large payday as pent-up demand to see them was met.
Such was the case in 1871 when the twins set off on a tour of Europe, visiting Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. Pay from the shows was often supplemented by gifts from European rulers and aristocrats when they appeared at the royal courts of Europe. Back in America, the girls also agreed to make appearances at several American medical institutions and colleges for physical examination. This could be viewed as exploitative and somewhat cruel, but there was a genuine lack of understanding at this time about the phenomenon of conjoined twins, and doctors were anxious to gain a greater understanding of it.
Millie and Christine retired fully from the 1880s onward. They were now in their thirties and lived a quiet life back on the farm in North Carolina where they were born. Studies show that the twins discreetly helped their community, funding a local school for black girls and supporting several colleges in the Carolinas, often making these donations anonymously. They lived a considerably long life for conjoined twins, who often suffer from health complications owing to the nature of sharing vital body parts and organs.
In Millie and Christine’s case, they lived into their early sixties, and when they died, it was not from complications related to their being conjoined but from one of the major killers of the time: tuberculosis. This claimed Millie’s life on October 8, 1912, at sixty-one years of age. Christine reportedly died about twelve hours later, in what must have been a very sad ending. They were buried in a cemetery at Whiteville, where they were born over sixty years earlier.
Their gravestone bears the words “A soul with two thoughts, two hearts that beat as one. ” The twins left their considerable estate to their surviving family members. Millie and Christine’s story has been the subject of several biographies in recent times, reclaiming their previously forgotten history.