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They Were Big on Dignity

The tiny Tuthills of Orient were said to resist the sideshow life offered by P.T. Barnum

Cynthia Tuthill, in a 1832 painting, was 4 feet tall. (Oysterponds Historial Society)

By Irene Virag | Staff Writer

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You might think that Addison Tuthill would have been impressed when P.T. Barnum himself, the greatest showman of his time, came all the way to the little hamlet of Orient on Long Island's North Fork just to see him.

As the story goes, Barnum, the impresario behind such stellar attractions as the double-jointed India-rubber man, wanted Addison Tuthill, a Lilliputian Long Islander, to join his show. There is no record of what he offered, but at some point he would give Addison a 22-inch-long gold-handled walking stick and a pocket watch the size of a quarter.

Legend holds that Addison wasn't the least bit tempted. Nor was he awed by Barnum's added attraction, General Tom Thumb, the little man who boasted that he had kissed 2 million women "including the Queens of England, France, Belgium and Spain.'' Never mind that Tom Thumb had rolled down the Champs Elysees in a miniature gilded carriage drawn by tiny ponies. Or that his wedding to a little woman named Lavinia Warren, in 1863, jammed Broadway from Ninth Street to Union Square.

Addison Tuthill was a small man in stature only. He had a large sense of dignity and, it is said, was appalled by the general, who danced the jig and the hornpipe in Barnum's traveling show. As for Tom Thumb, he seems to have been jealous of Addison, who at 33 or 34 inches tall was at least a half-foot tinier than the man billed throughout the world as the smallest human alive. Perhaps it is only a tall tale, but the story is that the meeting of the midgets turned into a fistfight.

No one knows how the contest ended but one thing is for certain -- Addison Tuthill never put himself on public exhibition. Such a display would have been as out of character for Addison as it would have been for his equally diminutive sister, Emma, or their three slightly taller aunts, Cynthia, Lucretia and Asenath. They were the tiny Tuthills of Orient, descendants of a founding family, and they refused to take the low road to fame and fortune that ran through sideshows and circuses. Instead, they lived lives of quiet dignity in the everyday world that is perhaps the most difficult stage of all for anyone who is different.

Emma was born in 1840, and Addison a year later. Their parents and siblings were normal in stature. But their father's three sisters were known as "the small sisters.'' As children, Emma and Addison would hide beneath the dining room table when vistors showed up and play with their miniature Parcheesi or checker sets or read their tiny Bibles in the shelter of the crocheted tablecloth.

Portraits, personal belongings and old records offer clues to the way the tiny Tuthills looked and lived. Addison was a gentleman farmer who raised potatoes, turnips and Brussels sprouts and delivered fresh eggs to his neighbors. Emma and her aunts were expert seamstresses -- Emma stood on a chair to measure her clients. It is said that the tiny Tuthills walked single file on the lanes of long-ago. Addison in the lead, a neat man in a dark three-piece suit who grew a mustache in his mature years, followed by Emma, who wore a straw hat decorated with ribbons and pink roses and stopped to greet the women whose Sunday dresses and wedding gowns she had sewn.

Sometimes their aunts accompanied them as they strolled past the shoe shop and the schoolhouse and the white two-story inn where the stagecoach stopped. Cynthia with her long dark hair fastened stylishly high on top of her head with a tortoise shell comb. Lucretia with a monogrammed cotton chemise under her hand-stitched black taffeta blouse. Asenath holding a New Testament in one hand and a church psalmist in the other.

Dignity was important to all the tiny Tuthills, and it wasn't always easy to maintain. Men of the village frequently teased Addison, and there is a story of a woman relative who tossed the adult man in the air as if he were a child.

The tiny house where Addison and Emma lived no longer exists, but a house built by a relative for Cynthia and Lucretia after Asenath died still stands in the village. The current owners, Susan and Tom Madigan, who bought the small Cape in 1983, found out later who had lived in it.

"There are no vestiges left of that time,'' said Susan Madigan. "The ceiling in the living room was low but that's not unusual for a house that age. Of course, no one could stand up in the attic where the women did their sewing.'' And her husband recalled bumping his head on the low doorjambs before the ceiling was raised and the house renovated.

Until recently, some of the tiny Tut hills' belongings -- Lucretia's sewing box, an oil painting of Cynthia with rings on every finger, Asenath's silver thimble, Emma's monogrammed stockings, Addison's miniature Parcheesi chips -- were on view in a museum that was once the stagecoach stop. The Oysterponds Historical Society packed away the tiny artifacts to make way for a new exhibit on life in an early 19th-Century boardinghouse.

The little people of Orient might not be upset that their lives are no longer on display. When Addison died at 52 in his sleep on July 16, 1894, from heart trouble and pneumonia, he was the last of the tiny Tuthills. His obituary did not mention his size or his visit from P.T. Barnum. Instead, it noted his remarkable memory and patience, his studiousness as a boy, his belief in an afterlife -- the qualities that distinguished Addison Montgomery Tuthill in his time and place.