The Seven Sutherland Sisters and Their 37 Feet of Hair

Some stars of 19th-century freak shows were born, others were made. The Seven Sullivan Sisters: Sarah, Victoria, Isabella, Grace, Naomi, Dora, and Mary Sutherland, sang and played musical instruments on stage, but it was mainly something to do while everyone gawked at their hair -a combined 37 feet of hair between them!

Flaunting all that awesome hair onstage wasn’t quite enough to launch the Sutherlands from abject poverty to riches, so the sisters’ father, the Rev. Fletcher Sutherland, concocted a patent hair-growing tonic. Because Victorian women coveted the sister’s luscious locks, the cash came flooding in. The family grew rich beyond its wildest imaginations, as the sisters knocked serious political issues off the newspapers’ front page with their outrageous celebrity antics. By the mid-1880s, none of the sisters could walk down the street, their flowing tresses dragging behind them like dress trains, without being mobbed by starstruck fans.

But the sisters grew up poor on a turkey farm in upstate New York. And they each have an individual story. Read about how they became world famous, and what happened to them afterward, at Collectors Weekly .