She Stood 2 Feet 8 Inches and Said No to $15,000 | Lavinia Warren

Mercy Lavinia Warren Bump was born in 1841 in Middleborough, Massachusetts, into an old New England family. She stopped growing in early childhood and as an adult stood 2 feet 8 inches tall. At sixteen she was a schoolteacher. At twenty-one she was the most talked-about woman in New York. This is the story of the woman, not the exhibit: the diamond ring that did not fit and the fourteen-year-old rival who mistook it for a promise; a proposal over backgammon in P. T. Barnum's house; the $15,000 Barnum offered the couple to postpone their wedding by one month, and the answer they gave him; the "Fairy Wedding" at Grace Church on February 10, 1863, when police had to cordon off Broadway; the reception at the White House three days later, where Abraham Lincoln, in the middle of the Civil War, treated a bride two feet eight inches tall exactly as he would have treated any other; the world tour of 587 cities; the Newhall House fire; the death of Charles Stratton at 45; and the small gravestone in Bridgeport that says only "His Wife." Much of the courtship story comes from Barnum's own memoir, and we say so in the film. Where sources disagree (the number of guests at the reception, the Commodore's tear), we give both versions. Some scenes are historical reconstructions. Chapters 0:00 A marriage of mountebanks 0:45 I. The Teacher from Middleborough 1:51 II. The Most Famous Small Man in the World 3:02 III. A Ring That Did Not Fit 4:45 IV. Not for Fifty Thousand Dollars 6:17 V. The White House 7:36 VI. "I Was Not a Child" 9:06 VII. His Wife A story of a ring, a wedding, a President and a small gravestone — one of the lives that history measured but never understood. #history #documentary #tomthumb #laviniawarren #ptbarnum #lincoln #extraordinarypeople #forgottenhistory