In the summer of 1865, flames ripped through P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York City. Trapped on the third floor was one of his most famous attractions: Anna Haining Bates, a woman nearly eight feet tall.
She could not fit through a standard window, and as the fire roared below, her life hung in the balance. Other performers and staff rushed to her aid, guiding her to the building’s loft, where they smashed a hole large enough to lower her out. It took eighteen men working with ropes, blocks, and tackles to hoist her down to safety. Once on the ground, she used her great height to help pull others from the burning building.
Anna had not always lived among circus performers. She was born Anna Haining Swan on August 6, 1846, in the Millbrook region of Nova Scotia, Canada, the third of thirteen children born to Scottish immigrant parents. From infancy, she grew at an astonishing rate. By the age of five, she already stood four feet eight inches tall and weighed more than one hundred pounds.
Today, her condition would be recognized as gigantism, a disorder of the pituitary gland that causes overproduction of growth hormone. At the time, however, there was no accurate diagnosis, only a girl who kept growing far beyond the size of anyone around her. Despite her unusual stature, her childhood was relatively normal. Her parents were pious Christians who treated her with the same care as their other children, even as curious neighbors showed up at their home to gawk at the “giantess baby.
” She received a good education, loved reading, showed a talent for music, and was considered highly intelligent. Still, school was difficult. She was too large for the classroom desks, was teased about her height, and quickly outgrew her clothes, her shoes, and even her bed. Her father built her an extra-large bed, but providing for her placed a financial strain on the large family.
Word of the giant woman in rural Canada eventually reached the United States and the ears of P. T. Barnum, the most famous showman of the era. Barnum ran exhibitions in which dwarves, giants, and people with other unusual features were displayed to paying crowds.
In 1862, he sent an agent to Nova Scotia with an offer for Anna to come to New York and join his American Museum. Her parents refused. They were God-fearing Presbyterians who viewed Barnum as an unscrupulous figure, and they knew Anna wanted to become a teacher. Anna respected their wishes and moved to another town, where she began working at a school.
But there, she was insulted about her height, stared at constantly, and even followed through the streets. The discomfort became unbearable. She reached out to Barnum and accepted his offer. The deal she negotiated was strong.
She was to be paid a weekly salary, provided with a chaperone for protection, and given three hours of daily tutoring. She took piano and singing lessons, and she earned extra money by taking a percentage of the fee charged for photographs of her sold at the museum. She was soon making a good living, billed as the tallest woman in the world. It was a slight exaggeration at the time, since she was still growing, but she would eventually reach seven feet eleven inches.
Her first close call with death came when the museum burned. Anna lost all her possessions in the fire, and Barnum’s shows went on hiatus, leaving her temporarily without work. She returned home to Nova Scotia for a while, then resumed touring. Remarkably, she was present when a second fire destroyed Barnum’s new museum in 1868.
In early 1871, Anna set out on a tour of Europe. During the transatlantic crossing, she met Martin Van Buren Bates, a man from Kentucky named after the eighth U. S. president.
Known as the Kentucky Giant, Martin was seven feet nine inches tall and weighed around four hundred seventy pounds. Romance blossomed during the voyage, and by the time the ship reached England, they had decided to marry. The ceremony took place at the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London on June 17, 1871.
The couple toured Europe for the next year, billed as the tallest married couple in the world. They saved a considerable amount of money and then returned to America, where they decided to retire to a farm near Seville, Ohio. There, they stocked the property with cattle and horses. Anna was especially keen on taking in animals retired from circuses, ensuring they had a good home after their working lives ended.
Martin built a house for them with fourteen-foot-high ceilings and eight-and-a-half-foot-high doors so that neither of them would bump their heads. The portion of the house built for their servants, however, used standard dimensions to make them feel more at ease. The couple continued to tour with a circus during the summers, but by the mid-1870s they were semi-retired. It was a good life, and unlike many performers with unusual appearances who were exploited by their employers, Anna and Martin managed their careers shrewdly.
Over about ten years, they amassed a sizable fortune. Tragedy, however, followed them. On May 19, 1872, while still touring Europe, Anna gave birth to a very large eighteen-pound baby girl in London. The child was stillborn.
Anna and Martin fell into a deep depression, but they still hoped to have children. Six years later, Anna became pregnant again. On January 15, 1879, she went into labor at the farm in Ohio. A doctor was called.
Three days later, her water broke, startling everyone with the sheer volume of fluid, reportedly around six gallons. At first, everything suggested a quick and successful birth. Then the baby’s head emerged, and the doctor found it was too large for his forceps. A second doctor arrived, and together they wrapped a bandage around the baby’s neck to assist delivery.
After several attempts, they succeeded. Anna’s son weighed nearly twenty-four pounds, the largest newborn ever recorded, roughly three times the weight of most babies. He died after just eleven hours. It was Anna’s last pregnancy.
One of the most curious threads of her life was her friendship with Queen Victoria. During an early tour of England, Anna met the queen, and the two struck up a rapport. They remained in contact afterward. When Victoria learned of Anna’s impending marriage in 1871, she ordered the royal seamstress and tailor to design a bridal gown for her, made of many meters of braided satin and lace and decorated with orange blossoms.
It may have been the queen who arranged for Anna and Martin to marry at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, a church not ordinarily accessible for such occasions. After the wedding, Victoria received the couple at Buckingham Palace, gifting Anna a ring set with a cluster of diamonds and Martin a gold pocket watch on a chain. Years later, the queen wrote to Anna to express her sorrow at the death of her son.
To take their minds off the loss of their children, Anna and Martin briefly resumed touring in the middle of 1879, continuing for over half a year before performing their final events in the spring of 1880. After that, they retired permanently to Ohio, becoming deeply involved with the local Baptist Church. Anna died on August 5, 1888, a day before her forty-second birthday, at home in Ohio. The cause of her death remains debated.
She likely suffered from a pituitary tumor, and her unusual anatomy would have created myriad health problems. Some studies, however, conclude that she died from consumption, the nineteenth-century term for tuberculosis. She left behind a sizable estate valued at forty thousand dollars, the equivalent of several million dollars today. Some of her jewelry was bequeathed to family members, while other items found their way into a museum in her native Nova Scotia.
Martin erected a monument on her grave. He lived for another thirty years, remarried a woman of average height, and moved into town. When he died in 1919 at the age of eighty-one, he was laid to rest beside Anna and their infant son in Seville, Ohio.
To this day, a small exhibit marks the corner of Ohio that was once home to the tallest married couple on the globe.