General Tom Thumb

At the corner of what was then Main and North Streets in Bridgeport, in the winter of eighteen forty-two, a five-year-old boy named Charles Stratton met Phineas Barnum for the first time. Charles had been a normal-sized baby at birth, but had stopped growing at the age of six months and stood just twenty-five inches tall. Barnum saw him, and immediately understood that Charles Stratton was going to become someone else entirely.

Barnum named him General Tom Thumb, after the English fairy tale, taught him to sing and dance and do impressions of Napoleon Bonaparte, and within months had him on stage before audiences who had never seen anything like him. He was five years old and performing for presidents. A year later, he was performing for Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace. He met the three-year-old Prince of Wales. The tour of Europe lasted three years and made both of them famous.

Stratton was born on January fourth, eighteen thirty-eight, in Bridgeport, and he returned here throughout his life. When he married a fellow performer named Lavinia Warren in eighteen sixty-three, the wedding at Grace Church in New York was covered by newspapers across the country as the event of the social season. President Abraham Lincoln received the couple at the White House.

Stratton died in Bridgeport on July fifteenth, eighteen eighty-three, at the age of forty-five. He is buried at Mountain Grove Cemetery, not far from where Barnum himself would be laid to rest eight years later. The cemetery still receives visitors who come specifically to find his grave, a small marble monument next to a woman he met when both of them were employed in the business of astonishing strangers. He lived the life Barnum built for him, and by most accounts he lived it well.