April 22, 2015 • 33 mins
In the late 1800s, seven sisters with musical talent and incredibly long hair made waves in the circus and on the stage. They made millions as performers and haircare product moguls, but their personal lives were plagued with eccentricity.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm
tract Even Wilson and Tracy. I would like to start
this one personal question to you, which is what is
the longest your hair has ever been? Oh, it has
(00:24):
been pretty like midway down my back is the longest.
And that's about the longest that it will grow. It
was probably not quite that long. I was always very
envious of my cousin Missy, who had this like beautiful,
beautiful long long hair when we were children. Um, I
learned much later that it was just a terror to
(00:46):
to manage. Yeah, I had very long hair when I
was quite young, and my dad really liked long hair
and little girls. My mom kept threatening to cut it,
and he kept saying don't, and she finally had had
it and said, fine, then you're responsible for taking care
of her hair. And to his credit, bluss his heart,
he did. My dad was the one that shampooed and
brushed and dealt with my hair. But then when I
(01:06):
got older, I went through a hippie phase, like in college,
and it grew very long about you know, but length.
But now I could never manage anything like that. However,
just genetically will not get that long. I shudder to
thinking how long mine would get. Although it's not terribly pretty,
Like long hair is not always pretty, you know what
I mean, Like it doesn't retain it's like resiliency and
(01:27):
it's luster. You have natural oxidation as it grows out,
so the ends tend to be more brittle. But the
people we were talking about today had crazy long hair. Uh.
We're talking about the Sutherland sisters. They were Sarah, Victoria, Isabella, Grace, Naomi, Dora,
and Mary Sutherland. And these ladies were all really capable musicians.
(01:49):
They all sang and played and played instruments. Uh, and
they had a stage act, but their fame was really
not about their music so much. That played a part,
but really it was all about their incredible hair. So
we're going to talk about them today, and we will
start with sort of their early life with their parents
(02:10):
and kind of how they became stage children. So they
were born in the years that spanned from eighteen forty
five and eighteen sixty five, and their parents were Mary
and Fletcher Sutherland. This family had a turkey farm in Cambria,
New York and while I mean, they got by, but
they were definitely poor, and the girls really did a
lot of work on the farm, helping to take care
(02:31):
of the turkeys. Yeah, you'll hear various accounts of them
kind of like barefoot and really raggedy clothes, kind of
running around the turkeyyard trying to care for things and uh.
But they always had this incredible hair from a very
early age. And while that was almost definitely due at
least in some degree to genetics, their mother may have
(02:53):
told a different story about it, because she was a
big fan of ointment, uh, and she would treat the
girl's hair with the as ointment that she concocted that
apparently smelled awful because she believed that it was giving
them these long, strong, lustrous locks, like the kind of
stuff that you would normally hear in modern ad campaigns.
(03:14):
But she was doing it with this really stinky ointment.
The smell of this concoction was so bad that their
classmates were always teasing the girls and they would all
hide whenever somebody came to the house rather than you know,
stand around talking about how bad their mother's hair treatment smelled.
But they did all have very long, thick care Yeah,
so whether the ointment played a part or not, we
(03:35):
don't really know, but uh so, their father, Fletcher Sutherland,
was really not a farmer by trade. He had inherited
that Turkey farm property from his father, Colonel Andrew Sutherland,
who was a man of some renowned uh So. From
nine th to eight forty five, Fletcher worked as a
minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church, and after that he
(03:59):
moved to politics. He kind of parlayed his ability to
speak in front of a crowd and eventually worked as
a speaker during President James Buchanan's eighteen fifty six campaign.
But even more than politics, what Fletcher really focused on
whence he left the ministry was the girls. He'd already
included them in church performances as singers from the time
they were really young, basically toddlers, but he had really
(04:22):
bigger dreams for them than singing during church services. Uh
Fletcher's wife, Mary actually died of dropsy in eighteen sixty seven,
and she was only forty three at the time. And
at this point their youngest daughter, who was actually also
named Mary, was still very small accounts very but you'll
see Mary listed as either two or three years old,
so still a toddler at this point, and it's at
(04:44):
this point that Fletcher had all of his children. At
this point, they had the seven daughters and they also
had one son, Charles, who was born kind of in
the middle of all the girls really step up their
musical act. So he made the kids learn to play
instruments as well as sing, and he started taking them
on tours around the county, and so they would make
appearances in churches, they would be at small theaters, they
(05:06):
would sing at fairs. And Naomi, who was thirteen at
the time that this really started rolling and she was
fifth in birth order of the girls, was the most
talented singer, and so she really garnered some pretty great
reviews as a standout of the family as they kind
of started to bolster their image. Over the course of
the years from eighteen sixty seven to eighteen eighty, the
(05:29):
touring territory of the family got bigger and bigger, and
the girls changed as well. Mary was no longer around
to douse their hair with really stinky ointment, but their
hair did continue to grow and their long locks became
the trademark of their act. During their performances, the young
women would unfurl their braids and reveal how long and
incredible their hair was, and eventually their hair really started
(05:52):
to eclipse their music when people talked about their show.
Charles actually stopped taking the stage with the sisters so
they can start appearing as the Seven Wonders. And I
found online and image of a handbill from this time
advertising the Sutherland's act, and it kind of cracked me
up and was wonderful, and it read matchless incomparable. Seven
(06:16):
Sutherland Sisters, seven wonders of the world, seven long haired sisters,
seven songsters, seven eccentric ladies, seven accomplished musicians, seven refined
and educated ladies, seven sisters all of one family. Seven
models of beauty and womanly grace. Seven ladies with forty
nine feet of hair, seven feet of hair each, seven
(06:39):
ladies with hair four inches thick. The Sutherland Sisters entertained
visitors with music afternoon and evening. The part of the
funniest handbill ever yet, the part about seven sisters all
of one family, really makes me laugh because like where
else would seven sisters be from? Like just borrowed from
other families where they had different sisters who weren't related
to each other. I don't know that's that's gonna come
(07:02):
up a little bit more in a minute. But the
thing that cracked me up the most is that they
say seven eccentric ladies and then two lines later seven
refined and educated ladies. Uh, it's just it's very they
wanted to catch all anything that might attract the crowd
got included in that one hand bill. Yeah. So despite
the fact that forty nine feet of hair was not
(07:23):
entirely accurate, I mean that would mean all seven of
them had hair that was seven ft long. The Seven
Wonders really took off, and in December of eighteen eighty
the Sibling Troop made its debut on Broadway. The following year,
Fletcher took his family on the road to travel through
more of the United States, and he took numerous stops
in the South, including the International Cotton Exposition in Atlanta. Yeah,
(07:46):
that's almost always when you read any of the accounts
about the girls, they talk about that stop like it
was a really important thing. And I am embarrassed to
admit I don't know about the International Cotton Expo very much.
Just kind of shameful since I live in Atlanta. But
it always sounds like it was. This was a big engagement. Uh.
And so Tracy had just mentioned that they didn't all
(08:08):
have seven feet of hair each, So we're going to
talk about that. While the ladies all had massive amounts
of hair, they were not really all equals in the
hair game anymore than they were equally gifted musically. We
said earlier that Naomi was really the standout singer. So
the shortest hair belonged to Sarah, who was the oldest girl.
Her hair was only and I have to use the
(08:29):
air quotes there a yard long, so it was a
little less than a meter. On the other end of
the spectrum was her sister Victoria, who was second oldest,
and she had the longest hair, which was seven ft
in length, which is about two point one meters, and
that's from root to tip. But added up amongst all
of them, it is believed that they had closer to
thirty seven feet for eleven point three ms of hair,
(08:53):
rather than forty nine, which would have been fourteen point
nine ms. So they all had there was three to
four was the shortest, seven the longest, feat and then
everyone else kind of fell in the middle at varying links,
kind of averaging around five to six. So all this
hair obviously was very recognizable, and the sisters could not
go out in public without just being mobbed, and some
(09:15):
of their admirers even went so far as to try
to sneak and sniffle lock of their hair away. Holly
couldn't find any definitive accounts of whether any of them
were successful in doing this, though, No, there were certainly
accounts of like people having offered some of them what
were at the time huge sums of money to cut
(09:37):
off all their hair so that they could have it.
I think at one point, UH someone offered Victorias to
cut her hair and she turned it down. But all
of this admiration and excitement that they were getting and
generating started to attract a completely different sort of attention,
and that was the eyes of agents uh, people that
(09:58):
promoted vaudeville and put together acts for vaudeville as well
as circus entrepreneurs. And so the Seven Wonders actually became
an act for the W. W. Cole's Colossal Shows in
eighteen eighty two, which they did for a little while,
but then by eighteen eighty four they had actually moved
away from that company into Barnam and Bailey's Greatest Show
on Earth and their act with Barnum and Bailey. The ladies,
(10:20):
who at this point ranged in ages from eighteen to
thirty six, were all white, and they performed a series
of songs before they let their hair down and this
grand finale that would draw gasps from the crowd. And
what's really interesting is that, you know, they were billed
as a sideshow act. They were uh, you know what.
Normally you'll even see them sometimes listed in lists of
(10:42):
like famous freaks, but their performances were really perceived as
being much more refined than most other circus acts. The
ladies themselves were refined, at least publicly. They would tell
tasteful stories, they would sing church music, and people who
normally viewed the circus as an entertainment for the lower
class started to be drawn to attendance by these lovely
(11:03):
Sutherland women's. They were very successful. And we're going to
talk a little bit more about each of them after
a brief word from a sponsor. So getting back to
the ladies, we'll talk a little bit about each one individually. Uh.
Sarah being the eldest, she kind of naturally fell into
the role of being the leader of the group, and
she was a soprano. She was also a really strong
piano player, and she used her natural musicality to teach
(11:26):
for a little while before the act became a full
time endeavor. And she was also known for always carrying
her Bible with her Victoria saying mezzo soprano parts, and
she's generally described as the magpie of the sisters. She
was the most obsessed with their clothing, and she was
a big fan of having expensive baubles to wear. Yeah,
(11:47):
because she had the longest hair, she was kind of
she kind of elevated to a certain revered status, so
people kind of indulge her in her love of clothes
and jewelry. Isabella, the third sister, was a ten and
she's actually interesting Tracy had mentioned earlier, like, of course
they are all of the same family, but there have
always been rumors that she wasn't actually maryan Fletcher's daughter,
(12:10):
because she really did not resemble the rest of the
family aside from the fact that she had long hair,
and there's been some speculation that she was a cousin
or even adopted from outside the family. There isn't solid
substantiation for those theories. There is some kind of hints,
like I was looking through a census record and it
lists her place of birth is slightly different from the
(12:32):
other girls, but it's like in the next county, so
it's possible that she uh, you know, it was just
a records thing. A lot of people have theorized that
she was actually the daughter of Fletcher's sister, but we
don't know for certain. Grace was an alto and maybe
the most talkative of the group. She's the one who
(12:53):
took on the role of negotiator, both in business and
in family arguments. She also had auburn hair, which set
her apart from her sisters, who all had brown or
black hair. The next sister, Naomi, is always described as
just really good humor uh and as we mentioned earlier,
she had the most praised voice of the group, with
a rich base. She's sort of always labeled as like
(13:16):
the sweetheart. Uh. Dora was another Alto and is routinely
described as the most beautiful of all of them. She
was also really personable, and she used her wit and
her charm to great advantage. Her brains would also lead
her to being a strong businesswoman. As the family fortunes
got bigger thanks to all their musical stuff. Yeah, and
(13:38):
then uh, Mary the Youngest was also an alta like Dora.
She was not, however, particularly gifted musically, and she was
apparently a little bit difficult to deal with. She was
prone to tantrums. Uh. It's believed she actually had some
sort of mental illness, although the specific nature of it
is not really clear. Allegedly, there were some doc there's
(14:00):
that theorized that her long hair actually contributed to her
mental health issues in some way, either by just adding
pressure to her head or causing her to hold her
head oddly. It's not really, it's always one of those
doctors think this. There's really no scientific basis for any
of these rumors, but it's well, there were also some
(14:24):
preachers that thought that her hair was somehow causing problems.
It's a little fuzzy. It's one of those things. You'll
always read it as like the throwaway line in any
description of Mary, like Mary had some mental problems. We're
not sure what, but some doctors think her hair was
too heavy for her head. And it's like that. I've
never once seen any sort of medical literature. Uh, but
(14:46):
with substantiate that kind of claim, uh, we were in
the earliest days of evidence based medicine at this point. Precisely, Hey, Dracy,
do you want to pause at this moment and have
a quick word from one of our sponsors. So when
it came to the Sutherland Girls, the whole group and
all of that hair was really greater than the sum
(15:08):
of its parts. And while fans would often fixate on
their favorite sister, it was the seven of them together
as an act that really drew in all the crowds.
So while all of this refined entertainment that the seven
girls were performing was going on, their father Fletcher was
hatching an entirely other money making scheme behind the scenes.
(15:28):
As early as eighteen eighty two, he was investigating the
possibility of developing a branded hair tonic that would capitalize
on the popularity of his daughters in their hair. He
concocted this tonic, which was allegedly based on his wife
Mary's formula, which he sent to a chemist for analysis
and endorsement, and the review that he got was quite good.
(15:48):
And here's a quote, Cincinnati, Ohio, March four, having made
a chemical analysis of the hair grower prepared by the
seven long haired sisters, I hereby startifive that I found
free from all injurious substances. It is beyond question the
best preparation for the hair ever made, and I cheerfully
endorse it. J R. Duff, m D. Chemist. And this review,
(16:12):
to me is actually sort of hilarious because later on,
according to an entry in the drug periodical The Pharmaceutical Era,
which was published in so almost ten years after this
was going on, uh, they had had another group try
to replicate this formula, and they determined that to do so,
you just needed seven ounces of bay rum, nine ounces
(16:34):
of distilled water of witch hazel, a drop of salt,
a drop of five solution of hydrochloric acid, and magnesia
as needed. So nothing especially magical was going on here.
I look at that list and I go, all right,
that seems like it might be great if your hair
was really oily, But for everyone else, right, that's gonna
(16:55):
that's stripper. Okay, cosmetics history so weird. As all this
was happening, the girl's father was having some difficulty getting
this new venture off the ground, at least until Harry
Bailey from the Barnum and Bailey Circus family offered his
help with the business. While the chemist was reviewing the
(17:18):
tonic that Fletcher had sent over, Harry, who was dating
Naomi Sutherland at that point, started the Sutherland Sisters Corporation,
and he applied for a trademark for seven Sutherland Sisters
hair Grower. And so once the proper paperwork was filed
and the chemist had endorsed this product, the hair grower
really started selling. And Harry was very good at kind
(17:39):
of pr and pushing this product, and so the Sutherland
Sisters Corporation sold about ninety thou dollars worth of product
in their first year. So as eighteen eighty four came
to a close, they were starting to make a lot
of money from this venture. The following year, in eighteen
eighty five, Naomi married her suitor and business associate, Harry Bailey,
so they also called this product hair Fertilizer, and just
(18:02):
a few years into the successful hair fertilizer business venture,
Fletcher Sutherland died. This was on September six, and his
obituary in the New York Times read, Fletcher Sutherland, the
father of the Seven Sutherland Sisters, died at his country
home near Lockport, New York, yesterday of paralysis. He was
seventy three years of age. He was a prominent Methodist
(18:24):
minister at one time, but he left the pulpit as
soon as his daughters took to the stage. And it's
interesting because in some biographies that you look at or
accounts of this, Fletcher is often characterized as kind of
a skunk like they talk about how he is perfectly
willing to exploit his children for money and how you know,
(18:45):
he was this very pushy stage father. Um. So if
that were the case, you might think that once he
had died, the ladies might have pulled back from their
life in the spotlight or these multiple ten drills of
businesses that were starting to happen. But in fact that
was not the case at all. With Fletchers passing, the
Sutherland Sisters inherited part of the company he had with
(19:06):
Harry Bailey, and the cosmetics low and afterward expanded considerably.
They added a scalp cleanser as well as a Sutherland
Sisters branded comb. Hair color was also offered in eight
different shades. But they also branched out of offering just
hair products and started selling face scream as well. Yeah,
they offered some other skin and facial products. They just
(19:30):
kind of became bigger and bigger and bigger, and the
Sutherland Sisters brand really employed an incredibly effective strategy to
market all these products, so trading on the lady's image
that they had kind of established at this point of
being refined and elegant. These products were priced fairly high
for the time, so things would range from between fifty
cents to a dollar fifty. That was substantial in the
(19:52):
late eighteen hundreds in early nineteen hundreds, and what this
meant was that their target audience was theoretically wealthy ladies,
but price point was just at that level where, uh,
this made the cosmetics line incredibly desirable for less wealthy women,
so they would spend probably more than they really should
have in terms of budgets so that they could also
have these products. And so in short, this approach worked
(20:15):
like a charm. It turned out that the women had
incredible business sense. They came up with brilliant taglines for
their products, and they spent their time away from performing
bolstering their merchandise business by modeling their products. Because business
was really booming, the company was also expanding into new
territories and they opened offices all over the United States
(20:36):
and in Canada and Cuba, and at the company's peak,
they had a sales force of more than twenty eight
thousand dealers, so this is a huge company. At this point,
the sisters were making millions from their products, and this
was one of the most successful cosmetics companies in North America.
So they continued to expand outside of just offering hair
(20:58):
and facial goods. They then started selling Sutherland Sisters memorabilia
to create an entirely new revenue stream. So one of
the things that they had was like, uh, trading cards
that featured each of the sisters and you know these
cute little poses. And at one point Victoria did sell
a single strand of her hair for twenty five dollars
(21:20):
and a jeweler had bought it so that he could
hang a diamond from the end of it in his
shop window. At this point, they had a lot of money,
and so they decided to build a new home back
in Cambria, where they had lived as children. So they
built a really really massive mansion which housed the whole
family as well as providing a home office for their
retail business. They spared no expense in the construction and
(21:43):
once everybody moved in, even the servants and the pets,
lived lives that a lot of other citizens in the
area really could hardly imagine. This shift in their new
mansion also marks a significant shift in the ladies lives
because they started to become progressively more and more eccentric. Yeah,
they had always kind of been labeled as eccentric, partially,
(22:04):
I imagine because they were just an unusual group, all
of these women with all of this hair, and but
they really started to kind of live that life of
wealthy captains of industry, like, completely full of over indulgences.
They would throw lavish events, these big parties for the
neighborhoods and surrounding community, which always ended with spectacular fireworks,
(22:27):
and the partying that they got into, according to the
rumors that were swirling at the time, uh, only got
wilder when the guests actually went home. So gossips started
to spread around Cambria and the Niagara Falls area that
the family was into very heavy drinking, even some drug use,
even some partner swapping. Uh. And there was even witchcraft
(22:49):
mentioned about what might be going on at the mansion
with this eccentric family when no one else was there
but in the middle of all this extravagant celebration of
their wealth, there was tragedy. Naomi died suddenly, in which
really wasn't long after they had moved into the house.
This left Harry and her three children behind, and she
(23:10):
was only thirty nine years old at the time. The
show had to go on, though. The sisters were still
working for the circus and they were making regular appearances,
so they hired a replacement sister. After auditions were held.
The job went to a woman with nine feet which
is about two point seven meters of hair. Her name
was Anna Louise Roberts. Yeah, there are lots of really
(23:33):
sort of disturbing stories about how the family dealt with death.
Apparently they kept Naomi there in the house for quite
some time while they were allegedly going to build her mausoleum,
but something we're not entirely sure what went wrong with that,
and the mausoleum never got built, and eventually they had
to just bury her in an unmarked grave. It's a
(23:55):
little bit and we're gonna hear some more crazy how
they dealt with the passing of others. Uh. The next
major event, however, in the Sutherland's life only added to
the rumors and speculations about them. Uh. It arrived in
the form of a young man named Frederick Castlemaine, and
he was from a wealthy family, and he was apparently
Dora's suitor. But then somewhere along the line something happened
(24:19):
very quickly and shocked everyone, and he married her sister, Isabella.
And this was scandalous for the obvious sudden romantic interest change. Again,
this kind of fueled those rumors of partner swapping that
had already been happening, but also because Isabella was more
than a decade older than her new husband. In terms
of odd behavior, Castlemaine really fit right in. He was
(24:43):
a man given to extremes, and he had kind of
a drug problem. He liked to shoot his gun from
the front porch. And in addition to these foibles, he
also created more a tragedy for the ladies when he
committed suicide while he was traveling with them during one
of their tours. Yeah, I saw one mention that he
had overdosed on opium, but I was not able to
(25:03):
get hard evidence on that. Uh, So that to me
kind of opened a question mark of wait, was that
a suicide or was that an accidental overdose. It's usually
mentioned as a suicide, but we don't know for certain.
But just as with Naomi, instead of burying this young groom,
the sisters first put him in a glass enclosure in
(25:23):
the house so that they could see him and sing
to him every day. He had not been embalved at
this point. Uh And this went on for a little
less than two weeks before the authorities stepped in because
the neighbors were complaining about the horrible odor that was
starting to come from the property. Uh. And Frederick was
finally laid to rest in a very pricey mausoleum that
(25:46):
they had built for him, which still stands today and
it houses not only Castlemain's remains, but also several of
the sisters as well. And all of the women seemed
really really heartbroken at the loss of Frederick, but especially
of course, is a Villa and she mourned him very
deeply for two full years. Another upheaval and loss followed
(26:07):
close behind the loss of Mr Castlemaine. Victoria finally got
married in at the age of fifty and her new
husband was only nineteen, so the marriage caused a huge
rift between Victoria and the rest of the family. She
and her new groom were not welcome in the family home,
and she and her sisters were estranged right up until
her own death in nineteen o two. Yeah, so there,
(26:31):
things are really starting to fall apart. At this point,
Isabella did remarry after her two years of mourning, again
to a much younger man that seems to be a
theme with the ladies uh named Alonzo Swain, and at
this point she was forty six and he was thirty.
But this marriage did not seem to be an issue
with the rest of her sisters and set off any
sort of arguments the way Victoria's did, like they've done.
(26:54):
When Naomi died, they found a replacement for Victoria. Her
name was Anna Haney and she had six feet of hair.
She was hired so the Settlements can continue their appearances,
but at that point the days were numbered for the group.
In nineteen o seven, they concluded their work with Barnamon
Bailey and Mary, who, as we mentioned earlier, has had
(27:14):
always had some mental illness that really isn't properly documented,
grew much worse after Victoria's death than she was, allegedly
making threats against her sisters at some point, at some
points when she was particularly upset, and their way of
handling this was to send her to her room and
lock the door, so she was kind of just shut away.
(27:34):
Isabella died in nineteen fourteen. Uh, And then the eldest sister, Sarah,
died in nineteen nineteen. And unfortunately, there was also some
social change happening that was kind of spelling the end
because by that time, the trend of ladies cutting their
hair in short Bob's was on an upswing, and that
basically spelled doom for a hair care retail business aimed
(27:54):
at keeping very long tresses tidy and strong. In an
effort to come up with another money making opportunity, sisters Dora,
Mary and Grace traveled to California. They were hoping to
sell their story to a motion picture studio and it
didn't work out. But to make matters worse, Dora died
while they were traveling. She was killed in a car accident. Allegedly,
(28:16):
her remains were never claimed because Grace and Mary were
too short on funds to do it. Yeah. At this point,
you know, the money was running out. Uh. And the
two remaining sisters who were unable to sustain anything even
vaguely resembling the lifestyle that they had known in their
heyday when they were spending money really willy nilly, because
(28:38):
it seemed like it was there was never an end
to it. Uh, they had to abandon their mansion in
ninety one, and unfortunately it burned to the ground seven
years later on January twenty one night. And one of
the the real tragedies here is that it took most
of the family records with it. So when I say
(28:58):
a lot of things, there are things that aren't substained, cheated.
Probably there was some paperwork in that house that could
have helped illuminate things, but it is gone. And Mary
actually died the year after the house burned. She at
that point had been committed to an asylum, and Grace
lived until but she was completely destitute when she died
and was buried in a potter's field. So while the
(29:20):
Subtle and sisters had had a really wild ride and
this really intense success for a while, in the end
it really kind of all fell apart and they were
just as poor, if not more so, than they had
been when they started on a turkey farm. Wow, So
I don't know if there's a good life lesson in there,
(29:41):
just not to laugh at tragedy, But you know, I don't.
It's one of those things we see it happen all
the time in in modern era, where performers become really
really popular and they make a lot of money, and
then you hear later that they're completely broken, they are
a mess and can't hould their lives together. And this
is not a new thing. It turns out this is
already happening all the time. Do you also have some
listener mail for us? I do. This is from our
(30:04):
listener Gina, and it is about our Artemisia Gentileski episode.
And I'm not reading the whole thing, but I wanted
to share some of her insights about Artemisia's work. She
majored in painting in our history and college and really
liked Gentelesky, so she has some good insights. And she says,
I really like the point you made about the culture
(30:25):
she was painting in and the time in which she lived.
But there are a few things I think could be
added in. First that Judith and Hallo Farnes itself was
a common subject matter among painters at the time. Second
that Artemisia is painting is rather more accurate in its
depiction of the physical aspects like blood spatter. While many
artists of the time presented anatomically correct figures, they stylized
(30:46):
the more groupesome details. Her depiction is more like real
life than illustration or allegory. For me, this is where
her experiences played a role in her work. She lived
through real things, and the women she painted weren't props
to tell a story. They were people with a history
in life all their own. This is what makes her
work so moving, this combination of great skill, great insight,
(31:06):
and attention to detail. And then she talks a little
bit about Caravaggio. But then I also really liked her
her PostScript on this one, she says, I really enjoyed
the letter to Galileo. Speaking of that plot point in
the Artemisia Gentileski episode, it inspired me to look at
more about the scientific and political events at the time
and think about them in connection with painting. I'm kind
(31:28):
of blown away by how much was going on Galileo's
telescope observations, Kepler's law of planetary motion, early American colonies,
and even the Dutch East India Company. I really have
never thought about the broader context in which the Baroque
artists lived, or even that Italy had just come out
of a war with a Reformation and was mostly controlled
by Spain. So thanks for the happy hours of research.
(31:50):
I too love those moments of insight where you realize
how connected these huge world events are with things that
we're talking about and to each other. That kind of
get I think compartmentalized a lot when we learn about
history and talk about it, and some of that is
just kind of information management, like you can't always paint
the full full picture, but it's really nice when the
puzzle comes together. So that was our lovely letter from Gina,
(32:12):
Thank you for those insights. If you would like to
write to us, you should do so at History Podcast
at how stuff Works dot com. You can connect with
this on Facebook at Facebook dot com, slash missed in
History at missed in History on Twitter at mist in
history dot tumbler dot com, and at pictest dot com
slash missed in History. We're gonna have good hair pictures
from this one. You can also buy some mist in
(32:34):
History goodies at mist in history dot spreadshirt dot com.
If you would like to research a little bit about
what we talked about saying. You should go to our
parents site how stuff Works. If you type Sutherland Sisters
and that's s U, T H, E, R, L, A
and D, you will get an article called top ten
famous female side show freaks and they are mentioned in it.
(32:54):
You would like to visit us online, you can do
that at mist in history dot com for show notes
and archive of all of our episodes, episodes and other goodies,
and we hope you do. We look forward to seeing
you at Miston history dot com and how stu works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Because it has to works. Dott World m H
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm
tract Even Wilson and Tracy. I would like to start
this one personal question to you, which is what is
the longest your hair has ever been? Oh, it has
(00:24):
been pretty like midway down my back is the longest.
And that's about the longest that it will grow. It
was probably not quite that long. I was always very
envious of my cousin Missy, who had this like beautiful,
beautiful long long hair when we were children. Um, I
learned much later that it was just a terror to
(00:46):
to manage. Yeah, I had very long hair when I
was quite young, and my dad really liked long hair
and little girls. My mom kept threatening to cut it,
and he kept saying don't, and she finally had had
it and said, fine, then you're responsible for taking care
of her hair. And to his credit, bluss his heart,
he did. My dad was the one that shampooed and
brushed and dealt with my hair. But then when I
(01:06):
got older, I went through a hippie phase, like in college,
and it grew very long about you know, but length.
But now I could never manage anything like that. However,
just genetically will not get that long. I shudder to
thinking how long mine would get. Although it's not terribly pretty,
Like long hair is not always pretty, you know what
I mean, Like it doesn't retain it's like resiliency and
(01:27):
it's luster. You have natural oxidation as it grows out,
so the ends tend to be more brittle. But the
people we were talking about today had crazy long hair. Uh.
We're talking about the Sutherland sisters. They were Sarah, Victoria, Isabella, Grace, Naomi, Dora,
and Mary Sutherland. And these ladies were all really capable musicians.
(01:49):
They all sang and played and played instruments. Uh, and
they had a stage act, but their fame was really
not about their music so much. That played a part,
but really it was all about their incredible hair. So
we're going to talk about them today, and we will
start with sort of their early life with their parents
(02:10):
and kind of how they became stage children. So they
were born in the years that spanned from eighteen forty
five and eighteen sixty five, and their parents were Mary
and Fletcher Sutherland. This family had a turkey farm in Cambria,
New York and while I mean, they got by, but
they were definitely poor, and the girls really did a
lot of work on the farm, helping to take care
(02:31):
of the turkeys. Yeah, you'll hear various accounts of them
kind of like barefoot and really raggedy clothes, kind of
running around the turkeyyard trying to care for things and uh.
But they always had this incredible hair from a very
early age. And while that was almost definitely due at
least in some degree to genetics, their mother may have
(02:53):
told a different story about it, because she was a
big fan of ointment, uh, and she would treat the
girl's hair with the as ointment that she concocted that
apparently smelled awful because she believed that it was giving
them these long, strong, lustrous locks, like the kind of
stuff that you would normally hear in modern ad campaigns.
(03:14):
But she was doing it with this really stinky ointment.
The smell of this concoction was so bad that their
classmates were always teasing the girls and they would all
hide whenever somebody came to the house rather than you know,
stand around talking about how bad their mother's hair treatment smelled.
But they did all have very long, thick care Yeah,
so whether the ointment played a part or not, we
(03:35):
don't really know, but uh so, their father, Fletcher Sutherland,
was really not a farmer by trade. He had inherited
that Turkey farm property from his father, Colonel Andrew Sutherland,
who was a man of some renowned uh So. From
nine th to eight forty five, Fletcher worked as a
minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church, and after that he
(03:59):
moved to politics. He kind of parlayed his ability to
speak in front of a crowd and eventually worked as
a speaker during President James Buchanan's eighteen fifty six campaign.
But even more than politics, what Fletcher really focused on
whence he left the ministry was the girls. He'd already
included them in church performances as singers from the time
they were really young, basically toddlers, but he had really
(04:22):
bigger dreams for them than singing during church services. Uh
Fletcher's wife, Mary actually died of dropsy in eighteen sixty seven,
and she was only forty three at the time. And
at this point their youngest daughter, who was actually also
named Mary, was still very small accounts very but you'll
see Mary listed as either two or three years old,
so still a toddler at this point, and it's at
(04:44):
this point that Fletcher had all of his children. At
this point, they had the seven daughters and they also
had one son, Charles, who was born kind of in
the middle of all the girls really step up their
musical act. So he made the kids learn to play
instruments as well as sing, and he started taking them
on tours around the county, and so they would make
appearances in churches, they would be at small theaters, they
(05:06):
would sing at fairs. And Naomi, who was thirteen at
the time that this really started rolling and she was
fifth in birth order of the girls, was the most
talented singer, and so she really garnered some pretty great
reviews as a standout of the family as they kind
of started to bolster their image. Over the course of
the years from eighteen sixty seven to eighteen eighty, the
(05:29):
touring territory of the family got bigger and bigger, and
the girls changed as well. Mary was no longer around
to douse their hair with really stinky ointment, but their
hair did continue to grow and their long locks became
the trademark of their act. During their performances, the young
women would unfurl their braids and reveal how long and
incredible their hair was, and eventually their hair really started
(05:52):
to eclipse their music when people talked about their show.
Charles actually stopped taking the stage with the sisters so
they can start appearing as the Seven Wonders. And I
found online and image of a handbill from this time
advertising the Sutherland's act, and it kind of cracked me
up and was wonderful, and it read matchless incomparable. Seven
(06:16):
Sutherland Sisters, seven wonders of the world, seven long haired sisters,
seven songsters, seven eccentric ladies, seven accomplished musicians, seven refined
and educated ladies, seven sisters all of one family. Seven
models of beauty and womanly grace. Seven ladies with forty
nine feet of hair, seven feet of hair each, seven
(06:39):
ladies with hair four inches thick. The Sutherland Sisters entertained
visitors with music afternoon and evening. The part of the
funniest handbill ever yet, the part about seven sisters all
of one family, really makes me laugh because like where
else would seven sisters be from? Like just borrowed from
other families where they had different sisters who weren't related
to each other. I don't know that's that's gonna come
(07:02):
up a little bit more in a minute. But the
thing that cracked me up the most is that they
say seven eccentric ladies and then two lines later seven
refined and educated ladies. Uh, it's just it's very they
wanted to catch all anything that might attract the crowd
got included in that one hand bill. Yeah. So despite
the fact that forty nine feet of hair was not
(07:23):
entirely accurate, I mean that would mean all seven of
them had hair that was seven ft long. The Seven
Wonders really took off, and in December of eighteen eighty
the Sibling Troop made its debut on Broadway. The following year,
Fletcher took his family on the road to travel through
more of the United States, and he took numerous stops
in the South, including the International Cotton Exposition in Atlanta. Yeah,
(07:46):
that's almost always when you read any of the accounts
about the girls, they talk about that stop like it
was a really important thing. And I am embarrassed to
admit I don't know about the International Cotton Expo very much.
Just kind of shameful since I live in Atlanta. But
it always sounds like it was. This was a big engagement. Uh.
And so Tracy had just mentioned that they didn't all
(08:08):
have seven feet of hair each, So we're going to
talk about that. While the ladies all had massive amounts
of hair, they were not really all equals in the
hair game anymore than they were equally gifted musically. We
said earlier that Naomi was really the standout singer. So
the shortest hair belonged to Sarah, who was the oldest girl.
Her hair was only and I have to use the
(08:29):
air quotes there a yard long, so it was a
little less than a meter. On the other end of
the spectrum was her sister Victoria, who was second oldest,
and she had the longest hair, which was seven ft
in length, which is about two point one meters, and
that's from root to tip. But added up amongst all
of them, it is believed that they had closer to
thirty seven feet for eleven point three ms of hair,
(08:53):
rather than forty nine, which would have been fourteen point
nine ms. So they all had there was three to
four was the shortest, seven the longest, feat and then
everyone else kind of fell in the middle at varying links,
kind of averaging around five to six. So all this
hair obviously was very recognizable, and the sisters could not
go out in public without just being mobbed, and some
(09:15):
of their admirers even went so far as to try
to sneak and sniffle lock of their hair away. Holly
couldn't find any definitive accounts of whether any of them
were successful in doing this, though, No, there were certainly
accounts of like people having offered some of them what
were at the time huge sums of money to cut
(09:37):
off all their hair so that they could have it.
I think at one point, UH someone offered Victorias to
cut her hair and she turned it down. But all
of this admiration and excitement that they were getting and
generating started to attract a completely different sort of attention,
and that was the eyes of agents uh, people that
(09:58):
promoted vaudeville and put together acts for vaudeville as well
as circus entrepreneurs. And so the Seven Wonders actually became
an act for the W. W. Cole's Colossal Shows in
eighteen eighty two, which they did for a little while,
but then by eighteen eighty four they had actually moved
away from that company into Barnam and Bailey's Greatest Show
on Earth and their act with Barnum and Bailey. The ladies,
(10:20):
who at this point ranged in ages from eighteen to
thirty six, were all white, and they performed a series
of songs before they let their hair down and this
grand finale that would draw gasps from the crowd. And
what's really interesting is that, you know, they were billed
as a sideshow act. They were uh, you know what.
Normally you'll even see them sometimes listed in lists of
(10:42):
like famous freaks, but their performances were really perceived as
being much more refined than most other circus acts. The
ladies themselves were refined, at least publicly. They would tell
tasteful stories, they would sing church music, and people who
normally viewed the circus as an entertainment for the lower
class started to be drawn to attendance by these lovely
(11:03):
Sutherland women's. They were very successful. And we're going to
talk a little bit more about each of them after
a brief word from a sponsor. So getting back to
the ladies, we'll talk a little bit about each one individually. Uh.
Sarah being the eldest, she kind of naturally fell into
the role of being the leader of the group, and
she was a soprano. She was also a really strong
piano player, and she used her natural musicality to teach
(11:26):
for a little while before the act became a full
time endeavor. And she was also known for always carrying
her Bible with her Victoria saying mezzo soprano parts, and
she's generally described as the magpie of the sisters. She
was the most obsessed with their clothing, and she was
a big fan of having expensive baubles to wear. Yeah,
(11:47):
because she had the longest hair, she was kind of
she kind of elevated to a certain revered status, so
people kind of indulge her in her love of clothes
and jewelry. Isabella, the third sister, was a ten and
she's actually interesting Tracy had mentioned earlier, like, of course
they are all of the same family, but there have
always been rumors that she wasn't actually maryan Fletcher's daughter,
(12:10):
because she really did not resemble the rest of the
family aside from the fact that she had long hair,
and there's been some speculation that she was a cousin
or even adopted from outside the family. There isn't solid
substantiation for those theories. There is some kind of hints,
like I was looking through a census record and it
lists her place of birth is slightly different from the
(12:32):
other girls, but it's like in the next county, so
it's possible that she uh, you know, it was just
a records thing. A lot of people have theorized that
she was actually the daughter of Fletcher's sister, but we
don't know for certain. Grace was an alto and maybe
the most talkative of the group. She's the one who
(12:53):
took on the role of negotiator, both in business and
in family arguments. She also had auburn hair, which set
her apart from her sisters, who all had brown or
black hair. The next sister, Naomi, is always described as
just really good humor uh and as we mentioned earlier,
she had the most praised voice of the group, with
a rich base. She's sort of always labeled as like
(13:16):
the sweetheart. Uh. Dora was another Alto and is routinely
described as the most beautiful of all of them. She
was also really personable, and she used her wit and
her charm to great advantage. Her brains would also lead
her to being a strong businesswoman. As the family fortunes
got bigger thanks to all their musical stuff. Yeah, and
(13:38):
then uh, Mary the Youngest was also an alta like Dora.
She was not, however, particularly gifted musically, and she was
apparently a little bit difficult to deal with. She was
prone to tantrums. Uh. It's believed she actually had some
sort of mental illness, although the specific nature of it
is not really clear. Allegedly, there were some doc there's
(14:00):
that theorized that her long hair actually contributed to her
mental health issues in some way, either by just adding
pressure to her head or causing her to hold her
head oddly. It's not really, it's always one of those
doctors think this. There's really no scientific basis for any
of these rumors, but it's well, there were also some
(14:24):
preachers that thought that her hair was somehow causing problems.
It's a little fuzzy. It's one of those things. You'll
always read it as like the throwaway line in any
description of Mary, like Mary had some mental problems. We're
not sure what, but some doctors think her hair was
too heavy for her head. And it's like that. I've
never once seen any sort of medical literature. Uh, but
(14:46):
with substantiate that kind of claim, uh, we were in
the earliest days of evidence based medicine at this point. Precisely, Hey, Dracy,
do you want to pause at this moment and have
a quick word from one of our sponsors. So when
it came to the Sutherland Girls, the whole group and
all of that hair was really greater than the sum
(15:08):
of its parts. And while fans would often fixate on
their favorite sister, it was the seven of them together
as an act that really drew in all the crowds.
So while all of this refined entertainment that the seven
girls were performing was going on, their father Fletcher was
hatching an entirely other money making scheme behind the scenes.
(15:28):
As early as eighteen eighty two, he was investigating the
possibility of developing a branded hair tonic that would capitalize
on the popularity of his daughters in their hair. He
concocted this tonic, which was allegedly based on his wife
Mary's formula, which he sent to a chemist for analysis
and endorsement, and the review that he got was quite good.
(15:48):
And here's a quote, Cincinnati, Ohio, March four, having made
a chemical analysis of the hair grower prepared by the
seven long haired sisters, I hereby startifive that I found
free from all injurious substances. It is beyond question the
best preparation for the hair ever made, and I cheerfully
endorse it. J R. Duff, m D. Chemist. And this review,
(16:12):
to me is actually sort of hilarious because later on,
according to an entry in the drug periodical The Pharmaceutical Era,
which was published in so almost ten years after this
was going on, uh, they had had another group try
to replicate this formula, and they determined that to do so,
you just needed seven ounces of bay rum, nine ounces
(16:34):
of distilled water of witch hazel, a drop of salt,
a drop of five solution of hydrochloric acid, and magnesia
as needed. So nothing especially magical was going on here.
I look at that list and I go, all right,
that seems like it might be great if your hair
was really oily, But for everyone else, right, that's gonna
(16:55):
that's stripper. Okay, cosmetics history so weird. As all this
was happening, the girl's father was having some difficulty getting
this new venture off the ground, at least until Harry
Bailey from the Barnum and Bailey Circus family offered his
help with the business. While the chemist was reviewing the
(17:18):
tonic that Fletcher had sent over, Harry, who was dating
Naomi Sutherland at that point, started the Sutherland Sisters Corporation,
and he applied for a trademark for seven Sutherland Sisters
hair Grower. And so once the proper paperwork was filed
and the chemist had endorsed this product, the hair grower
really started selling. And Harry was very good at kind
(17:39):
of pr and pushing this product, and so the Sutherland
Sisters Corporation sold about ninety thou dollars worth of product
in their first year. So as eighteen eighty four came
to a close, they were starting to make a lot
of money from this venture. The following year, in eighteen
eighty five, Naomi married her suitor and business associate, Harry Bailey,
so they also called this product hair Fertilizer, and just
(18:02):
a few years into the successful hair fertilizer business venture,
Fletcher Sutherland died. This was on September six, and his
obituary in the New York Times read, Fletcher Sutherland, the
father of the Seven Sutherland Sisters, died at his country
home near Lockport, New York, yesterday of paralysis. He was
seventy three years of age. He was a prominent Methodist
(18:24):
minister at one time, but he left the pulpit as
soon as his daughters took to the stage. And it's
interesting because in some biographies that you look at or
accounts of this, Fletcher is often characterized as kind of
a skunk like they talk about how he is perfectly
willing to exploit his children for money and how you know,
(18:45):
he was this very pushy stage father. Um. So if
that were the case, you might think that once he
had died, the ladies might have pulled back from their
life in the spotlight or these multiple ten drills of
businesses that were starting to happen. But in fact that
was not the case at all. With Fletchers passing, the
Sutherland Sisters inherited part of the company he had with
(19:06):
Harry Bailey, and the cosmetics low and afterward expanded considerably.
They added a scalp cleanser as well as a Sutherland
Sisters branded comb. Hair color was also offered in eight
different shades. But they also branched out of offering just
hair products and started selling face scream as well. Yeah,
they offered some other skin and facial products. They just
(19:30):
kind of became bigger and bigger and bigger, and the
Sutherland Sisters brand really employed an incredibly effective strategy to
market all these products, so trading on the lady's image
that they had kind of established at this point of
being refined and elegant. These products were priced fairly high
for the time, so things would range from between fifty
cents to a dollar fifty. That was substantial in the
(19:52):
late eighteen hundreds in early nineteen hundreds, and what this
meant was that their target audience was theoretically wealthy ladies,
but price point was just at that level where, uh,
this made the cosmetics line incredibly desirable for less wealthy women,
so they would spend probably more than they really should
have in terms of budgets so that they could also
have these products. And so in short, this approach worked
(20:15):
like a charm. It turned out that the women had
incredible business sense. They came up with brilliant taglines for
their products, and they spent their time away from performing
bolstering their merchandise business by modeling their products. Because business
was really booming, the company was also expanding into new
territories and they opened offices all over the United States
(20:36):
and in Canada and Cuba, and at the company's peak,
they had a sales force of more than twenty eight
thousand dealers, so this is a huge company. At this point,
the sisters were making millions from their products, and this
was one of the most successful cosmetics companies in North America.
So they continued to expand outside of just offering hair
(20:58):
and facial goods. They then started selling Sutherland Sisters memorabilia
to create an entirely new revenue stream. So one of
the things that they had was like, uh, trading cards
that featured each of the sisters and you know these
cute little poses. And at one point Victoria did sell
a single strand of her hair for twenty five dollars
(21:20):
and a jeweler had bought it so that he could
hang a diamond from the end of it in his
shop window. At this point, they had a lot of money,
and so they decided to build a new home back
in Cambria, where they had lived as children. So they
built a really really massive mansion which housed the whole
family as well as providing a home office for their
retail business. They spared no expense in the construction and
(21:43):
once everybody moved in, even the servants and the pets,
lived lives that a lot of other citizens in the
area really could hardly imagine. This shift in their new
mansion also marks a significant shift in the ladies lives
because they started to become progressively more and more eccentric. Yeah,
they had always kind of been labeled as eccentric, partially,
(22:04):
I imagine because they were just an unusual group, all
of these women with all of this hair, and but
they really started to kind of live that life of
wealthy captains of industry, like, completely full of over indulgences.
They would throw lavish events, these big parties for the
neighborhoods and surrounding community, which always ended with spectacular fireworks,
(22:27):
and the partying that they got into, according to the
rumors that were swirling at the time, uh, only got
wilder when the guests actually went home. So gossips started
to spread around Cambria and the Niagara Falls area that
the family was into very heavy drinking, even some drug use,
even some partner swapping. Uh. And there was even witchcraft
(22:49):
mentioned about what might be going on at the mansion
with this eccentric family when no one else was there
but in the middle of all this extravagant celebration of
their wealth, there was tragedy. Naomi died suddenly, in which
really wasn't long after they had moved into the house.
This left Harry and her three children behind, and she
(23:10):
was only thirty nine years old at the time. The
show had to go on, though. The sisters were still
working for the circus and they were making regular appearances,
so they hired a replacement sister. After auditions were held.
The job went to a woman with nine feet which
is about two point seven meters of hair. Her name
was Anna Louise Roberts. Yeah, there are lots of really
(23:33):
sort of disturbing stories about how the family dealt with death.
Apparently they kept Naomi there in the house for quite
some time while they were allegedly going to build her mausoleum,
but something we're not entirely sure what went wrong with that,
and the mausoleum never got built, and eventually they had
to just bury her in an unmarked grave. It's a
(23:55):
little bit and we're gonna hear some more crazy how
they dealt with the passing of others. Uh. The next
major event, however, in the Sutherland's life only added to
the rumors and speculations about them. Uh. It arrived in
the form of a young man named Frederick Castlemaine, and
he was from a wealthy family, and he was apparently
Dora's suitor. But then somewhere along the line something happened
(24:19):
very quickly and shocked everyone, and he married her sister, Isabella.
And this was scandalous for the obvious sudden romantic interest change. Again,
this kind of fueled those rumors of partner swapping that
had already been happening, but also because Isabella was more
than a decade older than her new husband. In terms
of odd behavior, Castlemaine really fit right in. He was
(24:43):
a man given to extremes, and he had kind of
a drug problem. He liked to shoot his gun from
the front porch. And in addition to these foibles, he
also created more a tragedy for the ladies when he
committed suicide while he was traveling with them during one
of their tours. Yeah, I saw one mention that he
had overdosed on opium, but I was not able to
(25:03):
get hard evidence on that. Uh, So that to me
kind of opened a question mark of wait, was that
a suicide or was that an accidental overdose. It's usually
mentioned as a suicide, but we don't know for certain.
But just as with Naomi, instead of burying this young groom,
the sisters first put him in a glass enclosure in
(25:23):
the house so that they could see him and sing
to him every day. He had not been embalved at
this point. Uh And this went on for a little
less than two weeks before the authorities stepped in because
the neighbors were complaining about the horrible odor that was
starting to come from the property. Uh. And Frederick was
finally laid to rest in a very pricey mausoleum that
(25:46):
they had built for him, which still stands today and
it houses not only Castlemain's remains, but also several of
the sisters as well. And all of the women seemed
really really heartbroken at the loss of Frederick, but especially
of course, is a Villa and she mourned him very
deeply for two full years. Another upheaval and loss followed
(26:07):
close behind the loss of Mr Castlemaine. Victoria finally got
married in at the age of fifty and her new
husband was only nineteen, so the marriage caused a huge
rift between Victoria and the rest of the family. She
and her new groom were not welcome in the family home,
and she and her sisters were estranged right up until
her own death in nineteen o two. Yeah, so there,
(26:31):
things are really starting to fall apart. At this point,
Isabella did remarry after her two years of mourning, again
to a much younger man that seems to be a
theme with the ladies uh named Alonzo Swain, and at
this point she was forty six and he was thirty.
But this marriage did not seem to be an issue
with the rest of her sisters and set off any
sort of arguments the way Victoria's did, like they've done.
(26:54):
When Naomi died, they found a replacement for Victoria. Her
name was Anna Haney and she had six feet of hair.
She was hired so the Settlements can continue their appearances,
but at that point the days were numbered for the group.
In nineteen o seven, they concluded their work with Barnamon
Bailey and Mary, who, as we mentioned earlier, has had
(27:14):
always had some mental illness that really isn't properly documented,
grew much worse after Victoria's death than she was, allegedly
making threats against her sisters at some point, at some
points when she was particularly upset, and their way of
handling this was to send her to her room and
lock the door, so she was kind of just shut away.
(27:34):
Isabella died in nineteen fourteen. Uh, And then the eldest sister, Sarah,
died in nineteen nineteen. And unfortunately, there was also some
social change happening that was kind of spelling the end
because by that time, the trend of ladies cutting their
hair in short Bob's was on an upswing, and that
basically spelled doom for a hair care retail business aimed
(27:54):
at keeping very long tresses tidy and strong. In an
effort to come up with another money making opportunity, sisters Dora,
Mary and Grace traveled to California. They were hoping to
sell their story to a motion picture studio and it
didn't work out. But to make matters worse, Dora died
while they were traveling. She was killed in a car accident. Allegedly,
(28:16):
her remains were never claimed because Grace and Mary were
too short on funds to do it. Yeah. At this point,
you know, the money was running out. Uh. And the
two remaining sisters who were unable to sustain anything even
vaguely resembling the lifestyle that they had known in their
heyday when they were spending money really willy nilly, because
(28:38):
it seemed like it was there was never an end
to it. Uh, they had to abandon their mansion in
ninety one, and unfortunately it burned to the ground seven
years later on January twenty one night. And one of
the the real tragedies here is that it took most
of the family records with it. So when I say
(28:58):
a lot of things, there are things that aren't substained, cheated.
Probably there was some paperwork in that house that could
have helped illuminate things, but it is gone. And Mary
actually died the year after the house burned. She at
that point had been committed to an asylum, and Grace
lived until but she was completely destitute when she died
and was buried in a potter's field. So while the
(29:20):
Subtle and sisters had had a really wild ride and
this really intense success for a while, in the end
it really kind of all fell apart and they were
just as poor, if not more so, than they had
been when they started on a turkey farm. Wow, So
I don't know if there's a good life lesson in there,
(29:41):
just not to laugh at tragedy, But you know, I don't.
It's one of those things we see it happen all
the time in in modern era, where performers become really
really popular and they make a lot of money, and
then you hear later that they're completely broken, they are
a mess and can't hould their lives together. And this
is not a new thing. It turns out this is
already happening all the time. Do you also have some
listener mail for us? I do. This is from our
(30:04):
listener Gina, and it is about our Artemisia Gentileski episode.
And I'm not reading the whole thing, but I wanted
to share some of her insights about Artemisia's work. She
majored in painting in our history and college and really
liked Gentelesky, so she has some good insights. And she says,
I really like the point you made about the culture
(30:25):
she was painting in and the time in which she lived.
But there are a few things I think could be
added in. First that Judith and Hallo Farnes itself was
a common subject matter among painters at the time. Second
that Artemisia is painting is rather more accurate in its
depiction of the physical aspects like blood spatter. While many
artists of the time presented anatomically correct figures, they stylized
(30:46):
the more groupesome details. Her depiction is more like real
life than illustration or allegory. For me, this is where
her experiences played a role in her work. She lived
through real things, and the women she painted weren't props
to tell a story. They were people with a history
in life all their own. This is what makes her
work so moving, this combination of great skill, great insight,
(31:06):
and attention to detail. And then she talks a little
bit about Caravaggio. But then I also really liked her
her PostScript on this one, she says, I really enjoyed
the letter to Galileo. Speaking of that plot point in
the Artemisia Gentileski episode, it inspired me to look at
more about the scientific and political events at the time
and think about them in connection with painting. I'm kind
(31:28):
of blown away by how much was going on Galileo's
telescope observations, Kepler's law of planetary motion, early American colonies,
and even the Dutch East India Company. I really have
never thought about the broader context in which the Baroque
artists lived, or even that Italy had just come out
of a war with a Reformation and was mostly controlled
by Spain. So thanks for the happy hours of research.
(31:50):
I too love those moments of insight where you realize
how connected these huge world events are with things that
we're talking about and to each other. That kind of
get I think compartmentalized a lot when we learn about
history and talk about it, and some of that is
just kind of information management, like you can't always paint
the full full picture, but it's really nice when the
puzzle comes together. So that was our lovely letter from Gina,
(32:12):
Thank you for those insights. If you would like to
write to us, you should do so at History Podcast
at how stuff Works dot com. You can connect with
this on Facebook at Facebook dot com, slash missed in
History at missed in History on Twitter at mist in
history dot tumbler dot com, and at pictest dot com
slash missed in History. We're gonna have good hair pictures
from this one. You can also buy some mist in
(32:34):
History goodies at mist in history dot spreadshirt dot com.
If you would like to research a little bit about
what we talked about saying. You should go to our
parents site how stuff Works. If you type Sutherland Sisters
and that's s U, T H, E, R, L, A
and D, you will get an article called top ten
famous female side show freaks and they are mentioned in it.
(32:54):
You would like to visit us online, you can do
that at mist in history dot com for show notes
and archive of all of our episodes, episodes and other goodies,
and we hope you do. We look forward to seeing
you at Miston history dot com and how stu works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
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