Lavinia Warren - Personal Life

Personal Life

Romantically pursued by the tiny entertainer Commodore Nutt, her affections belonged to General Tom Thumb from their first introduction. She was married in an elaborate ceremony to Tom Thumb on February 10, 1863 at Grace Episcopal Church and the wedding reception was held at the Metropolitan Hotel which included the couple greeting guests from atop the grand piano. Her sister Minnie Warren was her bridesmaid. While admission to the actual wedding was free, Barnum sold tickets to the reception for $75 each to the first five thousand to apply.

Together, Tom Thumb and Lavinia Warren became famous, perhaps the most famous public personages of the 1860s. President Abraham Lincoln and his wife provided a reception for the new couple at the White House. Tiffany and Co. gave a silver coach to the couple. They amassed and spent a fortune over the course of their life together which would have made them millionaires by today's standards.

Lavinia bore no children. Lavinia's 27 inches (69 cm) sister Minnie also married a little person in P.T. Barnum's employ named Major Edward Newell and she became pregnant with a normal sized child arriving at 6 pounds (2.7 kg). Excitement was cut short by tragedy when Lavinia's beloved little sister Minnie and the baby died during childbirth on 23 July 1878. Several years later, Lavinia and her husband stayed at Newhall House in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and were narrowly rescued by their friend and manager, Sylvester Bleeker, from what had been referred to as "one of the worst hotel fires in American history". Within six months, on 15 July 1883, her husband suddenly died of a stroke at the age of 45, some say as a result of his never having recovered from the hotel fire.

Two years after her husband's death in 1883, she married Count Primo Magri, an Italian dwarf and they operated a famous roadside stand in Middleborough, Massachusetts. At the age of 73, she appeared in a 1915 silent film, The Lilliputian's Courtship, along with Count Magri. She died on November 25, 1919 at the age of 77 or 78 and is buried next to her first husband with a simple grave stone that reads, "His Wife".