Appalachian Figures
From Kona on the North Fork to the wider world
Martin Van Buren Bates was born on 9 November 1837 in Letcher County, Kentucky, probably in the crossroads settlement of Kona near Whitesburg on the North Fork of the Kentucky River. He was the youngest of a large farm family headed by John Wallis Bates and Sarah Walthrop (Wallis) Bates, early settlers whose land lay at the foot of Pine Mountain.
In family reminiscences recorded by descendant Ira J. Bates, the Kona farm sits on an old Native trail that crossed Pine Mountain at Pound Gap, a route associated in local memory with Cherokee and Shawnee travelers and with Daniel Boone. That deep time background gives some sense of how long people had been passing the place where a nineteenth century “giant” would grow up.
By all accounts Martin was an unusually large child. His own short autobiography, later sold as a pamphlet at his shows, describes his growth as steady and proportional. Modern summaries based on that pamphlet and on medical commentary say that his rate of growth surged when he was about six or seven, and that by his early teens he measured over six feet tall and weighed well over two hundred pounds.
Ira Bates writes that Martin’s father stood around six feet two and weighed about two hundred twenty pounds, while his mother was barely over five feet tall and of average build, with their other children of ordinary size. The combination of a typical frontier family and one son who kept growing helped feed later speculation about heredity, diet, and what the mountains might produce.
Even his birth year has generated debate. Some circus pamphlets and later writers gave 1845, which would have made him barely sixteen at the start of the Civil War. Census entries from 1850 and 1860 in Letcher County, however, line up better with an 1837 birth, and that is the date recorded in Confederate service records, in modern compiled military lists, and on his grave and death certificate. Most recent scholarship follows the 1837 date while noting that the confusion itself became part of his legend.
Teacher, soldier, and the 5th Kentucky Infantry
As a young man Bates left the North Fork to study at Emory and Henry College in Washington County, Virginia. Both Ira Bates and modern biographical sketches place him at the college when the sectional crisis spiraled into open conflict.
Before the war he worked as a schoolteacher, a detail repeated in Letcher County newspaper features and popular histories that remember him as a teacher who traded the classroom for the army and, later, the circus tent.
When Kentucky’s divided loyalties turned violent, Martin cast his lot with the Confederacy. Compiled Confederate service records show that he enlisted on 15 September 1861 as a private in the 5th Kentucky Infantry. Over the course of the war he rose through the ranks, eventually being commissioned an officer and later serving with Virginia State Line troops and a composite 7th Confederate Cavalry regiment as commands were reorganized in the upper South.
Stories about his size followed him into the ranks. WeAreTheMighty, drawing on local lore and veteran anecdotes, notes reports that Union troops traded rumors of a “Confederate giant who was as big as five men and fights like fifty”, a line that captures how quickly a very real officer from Letcher County slid into tall tale territory.
Camp Chase and the long way home
In the later stages of the war Bates fought in the Cumberland Gap region where Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee meet. American Battlefield Trust notes that he suffered severe wounds there and was captured, a sequence that matches his own account and that of his descendants.
Prisoner registers from Camp Chase, the large Union prison camp on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, list a Martin V. B. Bates among the Confederate officers confined there, and later newspaper sketches mention his time in the camp. Ira Bates adds a family tradition that he briefly escaped and was recaptured before the war’s end.
After release he returned to Letcher County, but like many former Confederates in eastern Kentucky he came back to a landscape marked by feuds, political violence, and hard economic times. Those conditions helped push him toward a very different kind of work.
Circus roads and the Nova Scotia Giantess
Family accounts say that Unionist home guards murdered one of Martin’s brothers after the war and that he decided “he could no longer remain in Kentucky”. He and his nephew John Wesley “Bad John” Wright left for Cincinnati, joining the John Robinson Circus. Wright performed as a trick rider and sharpshooter while Martin took his place in the sideshow.
Circus posters billed him as “Captain Martin Van Buren Bates, the Kentucky Giant”, often depicting him towering over an average sized man or over a group of fellow performers. Surviving photographs from the 1860s and 1870s show him in uniform or formal dress, one hand on his hip or resting on a prop column, his height emphasized by careful posing next to much shorter companions.
For roughly five years he toured the United States and Canada. He was practical about what his stature could earn. Popular accounts and his descendant’s research agree that he used the circus to escape postwar instability while still presenting himself as a former teacher and Confederate officer who happened to be extraordinarily tall.
On tour he crossed paths with Anna Haining Swan, a woman from Nova Scotia who had been exhibited by P. T. Barnum as the “Nova Scotia Giantess”. Their managers quickly realized that presenting the pair together would draw even larger crowds, but their letters and later reminiscences suggest that their relationship developed into a genuine partnership as they traveled side by side.
The giants’ wedding and a farm in Seville
In 1871 their promoter, Judge H. P. Ingalls, arranged a European tour. In his pamphlet autobiography Bates kept a dated list of their movements, noting the voyage from New York to Liverpool, receptions for editors and physicians in London, and the honors paid by British royalty.
On 17 June 1871 Martin and Anna were married at St. Martin in the Fields on Trafalgar Square. London papers dubbed it the “giants’ wedding”, and illustrated weeklies printed engravings showing the unusually tall bride and groom framed by a packed church. Queen Victoria received them at Buckingham Palace, supplied the satin and lace for Anna’s dress, and presented the couple with jewelry and an engraved watch.
After exhibitions in Britain and on the continent, the couple returned to North America and looked for a quieter base. In 1873 they bought roughly 130 acres near Seville, in Medina County, Ohio, where good farmland and rail connections gave them a place to retreat between tours.
There they built what local history still calls the House the Giants Built. Family accounts and Seville histories describe a front section with ceilings around fourteen feet high and doors nearly eight feet tall, furnished at a similar scale, with a rear wing built at ordinary dimensions for guests and hired help.
The Bateses did not entirely give up the road. Martin’s own notes record that he and Anna spent the seasons of 1878 and 1879 as leading attractions with W. W. Cole’s traveling show, returning to Seville between engagements.
Their private life, however, was marked by grief. Their first child, a daughter born in London on 19 May 1872, weighed roughly eighteen pounds and died at birth. A second child, a son born in January 1879, was reported to weigh more than twenty three pounds and to measure well over two feet long, living only a few hours. Medical journals and popular papers treated both infants as curiosities, and both are remembered on the family monument in Seville’s Mound Hill Cemetery.
Anna joined the local Baptist church, and the farm became a minor tourist stop. Seville’s historical writings emphasize that townspeople remembered the couple as good neighbors and employers, not only as curiosities from the circus world.
In August 1888 Anna died suddenly in her sleep, most likely from heart disease. The funeral had to be postponed when the first casket shipped from Cleveland proved too small. Bates eventually obtained one that fit and then ordered a tall white marble statue from Europe to stand above her grave on a granite pedestal. Afterward he sold the oversized house and moved into town. Within a few years he married again, this time to Annette LaVonne Weatherby, the daughter of a Troy, Ohio, minister.
Martin spent his last decades as a respected farmer and stock breeder, raising shorthorn cattle and large draft horses. Ohio death records list him as a retired farmer when he died of nephritis at Seville on 19 January 1919, aged eighty two. He was buried in the custom made casket he had kept in his barn, in the Bates family plot at Mound Hill beneath Anna’s statue, where visitors still read the names carved into the stone: “Martin Van B.”, “Anna H.”, “Babe”, and “Sister”.
How tall was the Kentucky River Giant
Like many giants of stage and story, Bates collected more than one height. Circus handbills and later press pieces often claimed that he stood seven feet eleven inches and weighed around five hundred pounds, numbers repeated in Ira Bates’s family account and in recent news stories from Letcher County that celebrate him as the “Kentucky River Giant”.
Modern researchers who have tried to reconcile those claims with measurements and records come in slightly lower. American Battlefield Trust describes him at about seven feet nine inches and roughly five hundred pounds, and Guinness World Records uses the same height when naming Martin and Anna the tallest married couple on record. Those figures are still extraordinary and suggest that showmen rounded his height up for better copy.
Because military and civil bureaucrats had to fit him into fixed formats, the documents they left behind help ground the story. Service records, census entries, and vital registrations agree that he was an exceptionally large man who continued to grow into adulthood. Taken together they indicate that, whatever exact inch count we settle on, Bates belongs among the tallest well documented individuals of the nineteenth century, towering above a family and community otherwise ordinary in size.
Why Bates matters
For Appalachian history Martin Van Buren Bates is more than an odd figure from a scrapbook of circus posters. His life traces a path from a farm at Kona on the North Fork to the battlefields of Cumberland Gap, from a Letcher County schoolhouse to an Ohio prison camp, and from Barnum’s American Museum to a quiet farm outside Seville.
Through that path we see how eastern Kentucky families moved through the wider nineteenth century world. Bates carried a rifle for the Confederacy, then turned his unusual body into an income in the traveling shows that crisscrossed the continent and the Atlantic. In the twenty first century, descendants and local institutions in both Letcher County and Seville trade stories, organize Giant Fest events, and raise funds for statues and historical markers, keeping his memory alive as part of both communities’ identity.
For researchers he also offers a case study in how tall tales and primary sources interact. Circus advertisements exaggerated his height, but their claims can be checked against muster rolls, census schedules, land deeds, cemetery markers, and a slim autobiographical pamphlet that he sold himself. Reading those records alongside family stories and promotional art lets us hold both sides together: the real Kentuckian who planted corn and tended shorthorn cattle, and the larger than life Kentucky River Giant who stepped from a Letcher County creek bank onto stages and newspaper pages around the world.
Sources and further reading
Confederate States Army compiled service records, 5th Kentucky Infantry and related units, entries for Martin V. B. Bates; National Archives, Record Group 109.
Camp Chase prison registers and Confederate officer exchange lists for prisoners held at Columbus, Ohio; National Archives, Record Group 249. We Are The Mighty
U.S. Census schedules, Letcher County, Kentucky, 1850 and 1860, households of John W. and Sarah Bates; Medina County, Ohio, 1870 to 1910, households of Martin V. B. Bates with wives Anna and Annette. Sorted by Name+2Geni+2
Ohio Department of Health, death certificate index for Martin V. B. Bates, 1919, Medina County; accessible through Ohio vital records and genealogical databases. Sorted by Name+2Find a Grave+2
Mound Hill Cemetery, Seville, Ohio, Bates family monument and plot; local cemetery guide and Find A Grave memorial 6194083. GUILFORD TOWNSHIP+2Find a Grave+2
Martin Van Buren Bates, autobiographical pamphlet (undated), sold at performances; long excerpts preserved in Ira J. Bates, “I Discovered my Great Uncle was a Giant”, Life and Times of the Kentucky River Giant (Medium, 2016). Medium
Ira J. Bates, “I Discovered my Great Uncle was a Giant”, Life and Times of the Kentucky River Giant (Medium, 2016) – a descendant’s synthesis that quotes family papers, Martin’s own pamphlet, and archival records. Medium
American Battlefield Trust, “Martin Van Buren Bates” – Civil War biography emphasizing his service in the 5th Kentucky Infantry and later mounted commands.
Joe Nickell, Secrets of the Sideshows (University Press of Kentucky, 2005) – includes a carefully sourced chapter on the Bateses, their heights, and circus promotion. Internet Archive+1
Blue Ridge Country, “The Kentucky River Giant: Martin Van Buren Bates Claimed 7’ 11”” (2020) – long form narrative focused on his Letcher County origins and the debate over his true height. American Battlefield Trust
Dustin Damon, “An Actual Giant Served in the Civil War”, WeAreTheMighty.com (2020) – popular history overview that summarizes Bates’s wartime service and later fame. We Are The Mighty
WEKU, “Letcher Co. to Honor Native Giant” (2011), with linked Lexington Herald-Leader coverage – on modern efforts to commemorate Bates in his home county. WeKu
Village of Seville, “History” page and Seville Historical Society materials – local histories of the Giants of Seville, the farm, and Mound Hill Cemetery. Village of Seville+2GUILFORD TOWNSHIP+2
YeahPot genealogy site, “Martin Van Buren Bates and Anna Hannon Swan”, and related compiled trees for Bates and Wright families – useful starting points for family structure and census citations, best used alongside original records. Geni
Vintage Everyday, “The Giants of Seville: Rare Photos of Anna Haining Swan and Martin Van Buren Bates, the Tallest Couple in the World” – curated photo set with a concise summary of their Seville years.
Atlas Obscura, “Resting Place of the Giants”, and Ohio.org, “Gentle Giants” – modern travel pieces introducing the Bates monument, cemetery, and museum in Seville. Atlas Obscura+1
Wikipedia entries “Martin Van Buren Bates” and “Anna Haining Bates” – compiled overviews whose bibliographies point toward additional newspapers, books, and archival leads. Wikipedia+1