Historian’s Corner

By Dan Shine

Voice Columnist

Tom Thumb

 This week’s column is taken from The West Haven Booster, dated November 1933, and written in the style of that era:

 Today we beg to recall to your recollection a big, little man, who in his boyhood spent considerable time in West Haven, at the home of a relative, still standing on a terraced hillside off Campbell Avenue (in the area of present-day Marshall’s Garage).

 Sixty years or more ago, this house was often pointed out as having had the distinction of harboring Charles Sherwood Stratton, otherwise known as Tom Thumb.

 Stratton was born in Bridgeport in 1838.

Connecticut’s famous showman, P.T. Barnum, early discovered the little chap’s possibilities and exploited them.

At this time, he weighed but 16 lbs. and measured but 2 feet in height.  His brain was normal and he was intelligent and teachable.  Combined with agility and something of the trickiness of a monkey was a wit enough to make those attributes count in making him into the most widely known and the best beloved freak in the whole world of showdom.

Of course Barnum, who knew the power of advertising exercised that power to the limit.

He took his protégé on tour through Europe.  While in London, he was commanded to appear before Queen Victoria who was much pleased with his performance and dubbed him The General, a title that thereafter stuck to him.

Barnum was wont to tell that when the time came for them to withdraw from the audience chamber, the little General, as was customary, began to back from the room.  This was too slow a progress, so Tom Thumb turned about and ran a few yards, then turned again and again began to retreat backward.  Again he lost patience and again turned and ran.  Thus alternating he at last amid the laughter of the onlookers reached the end of the room.

His miniature coach drawn by tiny ponies in glittering trappings his suites of toy-like furniture, his elegant costumes which he wore with strutting importance (funny as only his diminutive size could make it) were drawing cards wherever he appeared. 

In 1882 he married Lavinia Warren, one of the two sisters both dwarfs whom Barnum also introduced to the public.  The writer recalls having seen the Tom Thumbs in the late 1870s when they, independent of the Big Show, toured the East.  The General had by this time grown a trifle taller and somewhat heavier, and bore the stamp of maturity.  Mrs. Tom Thumb was an intriguing, human doll.

The Little General died in 1882, aged 44 years.