Real Girls: Why the Library of Congress has a piece of 161-year-old wedding cake

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The Library of Congress has a piece of wedding cake from the 1800s.

Love them or ignore them, celebrity weddings have seemingly always been a topic of fascination for Americans. One famous case: the wedding of Charles Stratton, aka General Tom Thumb, an entertainer known for his particularly small stature. At 40 inches tall, Stratton enjoyed a lucrative career singing, dancing, and acting; part of his success came from employment with famed showman P.T. Barnum, who dubbed him the "smallest man alive." In February 1863, Stratton married the similarly sized "Queen of Beauty," Lavinia Warren, in a dazzling New York display that attracted thousands of onlookers trying to get a glimpse of the couple. After the ceremony, a reception — to which Barnum had sold thousands of tickets — allowed guests to meet the pair in a receiving line. Ladies were handed a boxed slice of brandy-soaked wedding fruitcake on their way out.

After the wedding, Stratton and Lavinia were even welcomed at the White House by President Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd. But Lavinia's career dimmed after Stratton's death in 1883, and she used a slice of her wedding cake at least once to help her career. In 1905, she sent the then-42-year-old slice of cake to actress Minnie Maddern Fiske and her husband, an editor at a theater publication, along with a letter that said, "The public are under the impression that I am not living." Lavinia eventually continued performing until she was in her 70s, even starring in a silent film in 1915 with her second husband, "Count" Primo Magri. Today, two pieces of Stratton and Lavinia's wedding cake have outlived the couple — one donated to the Library of Congress in the 1950s as part of the Fiskes' papers, and another at the Barnum Museum in Connecticut.

Numbers Don't Lie

Approximate age at which Charles Stratton began performing for audiences

Cost of a ticket to attend the Strattons' New York wedding in 1863

$75

Weight (in pounds) of Queen Victoria's wedding cake, baked in 1840

300

Price of the most expensive wedding cake slice sold at auction

$29,900

The Library of Congress is the world's largest library.

America's Founding Fathers were avid readers, so it makes sense that Congress would fund a library for its own use. But little did the first legislature know the depository would grow into the world's largest library. Philadelphia and New York City were homes to some of the earliest American libraries and Congress; both cities served as the country's first capitals. But when Congress planned its final move to Washington, D.C., legislators worried that access to reference texts would be drastically scaled back. In an effort to keep the country's leaders well-read, President John Adams established the Library of Congress in 1800 with a budget of $5,000. The library's core collection held 3,000 books (mostly legal texts), but was destroyed just a few years later, in 1814, when British soldiers burned parts of the city; the collection was eventually rebuilt with help from Thomas Jefferson. Today, the Library of Congress houses more than 173 million items, and that number is constantly growing, since the curators take in nearly 10,000 new materials every day.

Real Girls

Friday 5 July 2024

Why the Library of Congress has a piece of 161-year-old wedding cake

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