By Pauline Masson –
When former alderman Carol Johnson recently asked longtime Pacific residents Dale and Dorothy Hoffman how long they’d been married, the answer was a show stopper.
The couple looked at each other broke into laughter.
“Well, Dale wasn’t my first husband,” Dorothy said.
What?
The little repartee called up a 1940 pageant at the old Bend School, that was a history lesson of sorts, a celebration of an historic event that had been of such great public interest it pushed Civil War news off the front page of the New York Times for three day.
All fifteen students in the school that year were to play a part in a famous wedding party. Six-year-old Dorothy Mueller and Eugene Cole would be the bride and groom. The school teacher Miss Humphry set the stage.
General Tom Thumb, P.T. Bartnum’s famous song and dance dwarf and Lavinia Warren, also a Barnum dwarf were married in what turned out to be a wedding for the centuries.
The February 10, 1863 ceremony took place at Grace Episcopal Church in New York before 2,000 guests, including congressmen, generals and the cream of New York society. Outside the church 10,000 spectators lined the street to get a glimpse of the couple.
Barnum had a sumptuous miniature wedding dress sewn up for the tiny bride and a similar gown for her bride’s maid, her sister Minnie. Tom Thumb and his best man Commodore George Washington Morrison Nutt were suited in hand made tuxedos.
Famed Civil War photographer Matthew Brady was hired to photograph the event. His pictures were printed on newspapers across the country. Harper’s Weekly put the wedding couple on the its February 21, 1863 cover.
The following day, President Abraham Lincoln gave a grand reception at the White House for the wedding party, reported as a sparkling social event to offer a moment of gaiety in the somber war-weary capital.
Dorothy Hoffman is unsure why she was selected to be the bride at the Bend School re-enactment of the famous wedding.
“It was probably because I was the youngest student,” she said.
Dorothy is also unsure about how her wedding dress and veil suddenly appeared.
“I think Miss Humphry fixed it all up,” she said. Did she ever.
All 15 students were dressed up for the formal event – the girls in long dresses and the boys in suit jackets and white pants. To keep everything in perspective, maid of honor Ruth Snyder’s little sister Leona, not yet old enough for school, was recruited to be the flower girl. The bride, maid of honor and flower girl all held bouquets of cut flowers.
The bride and groom, second and third from left in the front row, with chins tucked under, smile shyly at the camera. Peeking over the shoulder of the groom is Dorothy Mueller’s second husband Dale Hoffman, whom she married in 1955.
Dorothy, says she does not recall much detail about the actual wedding – she was six years old at the time – but she cherishes the two three-inch by five-inch snapshots she has of the day. And she could recall the name of every student in the wedding party photo.
Miss Hmphrey probably had some help in her role as wedding planner. By 1940 Tom Thumb weddings had become popular school pageants. Publishers in the U.S. and England were putting out booklets that offered detailed instruction for staging Tom Thumb weddings that were distributed to schools.
The subject was captivating. Tom Thumb was born Charles Sherwood Stratton January and 4,1838, a strapping nine-pound baby. But he stopped growing at six months when he was only 25 inches tall due pituitary dwarfism, a condition that was little understood at the time.
Famous showman Phinias T. Barnum heard about the lively Lilliputian child, who regaled family and friends with a vibrant personality. He convinced Charles’ parents to bring Charles to New York, where he became part of the P.T.Barnum museum at Broadway, Park and Ann Streets. The Stratons were given an apartment in the five-strory-building.
Barnum taught Charles to sing, dance, mime, and impersonate famous people and named him General Tom Thumb, after a miniature character in an English fairy tale. As Tom Thumb became Barnum’s star attraction he arranged a tour of England. Queen Victoria requested that the General perform for her court. The then 25-inch tall performer offered a lively rendition of Old Dan Tucker, that so enthralled the queen he was invited to perform all over London.
In his teen age years, Tom Thumb mysteriously began to grow slowly and by age twenty had reached the height of three feet, ten inches, which was his height until his death in July 1883 at age 45 of a stroke. Lavinia would live for 35 more years. They are buried side by side in Mountain Grove Cemetery in Bridgeport Connecticut.
But their memory lives on in children from six to 96, as they say, in Tom Thumb weddings that are staged to this day.
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