Anna of Central New Annan

One of the opportunities I like to exploit on a road trip is the ability to exchange the busy expressway for the benefits of the road less traveled. Jan and I went to the Nova Scotia mainland, principally to see Doris, my dear old Mum, and to hang out with good pals Garth and Carole at Amherst Shore.

My claim in this context is simple: back roads offer infinite prospects for discovery and edification. Nova Scotia collector roads 256 and 246 in Cumberland County feature four communities named for Annan, the town Scots emigrants forsook in the early 1800s for a life in New Scotland. The motorist driving west on 256 first encounters Central New Annan. One might imagine that East New Annan is situated east of Central New Annan but, no, it lies to the south. West New Annan is indeed west, but not as far west as the final namesake community, Annandale.

At Central New Annan my eye was caught by a commemorative cairn I initially thought might be a war memorial, something I seldom pass by without taking a look. But no, the monument, right by the 1866 Wilson School, commemorates not local boys obliterated in the battlefields of Flanders and Picardy, but a young woman who grew to worldwide fame on the basis of her astonishing height.

Born in 1846 at Middlebrook, Colchester County, Anna Swan moved with her family to Central New Annan at age three. Anna’s beleaguered mother managed to survive her daughter’s birth despite the fact that the newborn entered the world at sixteen pounds. On her fifteenth birthday young Anna was already seven feet tall, not nearly the full height she would ultimately reach.

In a time before it became socially unacceptable to gawk at people of unusual configuration, Anna Swan became a celebrity: the world’s tallest woman, a circus star of the first magnitude. At seven feet, eleven inches, Anna soared a full four inches over the tallest man ever to play NBA basketball. She weighed 330 pounds and walked about on feet more than fourteen inches long. One of the striking surviving images of Anna in her circus career is one in which she holds a diminutive young man in the palm of her right hand.

In her early 20s she had journeyed to Halifax to see a traveling circus where two things of consequence occurred: she was hired on the spot by the circus promoter and, what’s more, met her future husband. The spouse-to-be was Martin Van Buren Bates who at 7’ 7 1/2” was three inches and change shorter than the future Mrs. Bates. Named for the eighth U.S president, Martin was dubbed the Kentucky Giant. He was a soldier hero of the Confederacy who despite being two feet taller than every other Confederate soldier in action beside him managed to survive the war without being picked off by a Union sharpshooter.

In a celebrity wedding for the ages, Martin married the woman of his dreams at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London, in June 1871. The bride was 26, the groom 34. Many thousands of Londoners sought to attend the colossal event but there simply wasn’t room to accommodate them all. Among those most impressed by the remarkable nuptials was Queen Victoria herself: she gave each of the newlyweds a diamond-studded gold watch of extra-large dimension.

Their circus freak-show days behind them, the happy couple opted for a quiet farm life at Seville, Ohio. There the husband built a monumental house for himself and his bride. The ceilings were fourteen feet high; the eight-foot doors barely high enough to allow Anna to pass through without stooping. Anna gave birth twice, each event ending in grief. An eighteen-pound daughter died at birth in 1872. In January 1879 Anna gave birth to a son. At 23 pounds, nine ounces, the boy remains the biggest newborn in history. Sadly, the infant giant lived only eleven hours.

Anna died suddenly and without warning in her sleep August 5, 1888, just one day before her 42^nd birthday. To honour his remarkable wife Martin Bates commissioned a grave marker featuring a statue in Anna’s likeness. The grave, shared with her short-lived children, is in Mound Hill Cemetery, Seville.

Nine years after Anna’s passing, in 1897, Martin married again. This time he chose a bride of normal stature. Despite the hazards accruing to someone of extraordinary height, Martin lived into his 82^nd year. Meanwhile, Anna occupies a final resting place far removed from the Nova Scotia hamlet that nurtured her tender years. I feel gratitude to the good folks along Nova Scotia Highway 256 who have seen to it that young Anna Swan of Central New Annan is not entirely forgotten.