Special Edition – The Twins    10/31/17

In the realm of the unexpected . . .

We are staying at the Mayberry Campground for 4 nights.  We had no idea of the history here!  We were just looking for someplace in the Mt Airy area for our first stop as we head South for the winter.

Here’s what we learned:

Mayberry Campground is a privately owned RV park located in the small town of Mt. Airy, NC which is often referred to as Mayberry.  The land the campground is built on was once part of a 2,000 acre farm owned by the original Siamese twins, Eng and Chang Bunker.  The twins and their wives, Sarah (Eng) and Adelaide (Chang), settled in Mt. Airy, NC.  Eng and Chang each had their own home and would stay at one residence for three nights, then go to the other residence for three nights. Eng and Sara had 11 children while Chang and Adelaide had 10.  The twins were never separated and died on January 17, 1874 at the age of 62.
Within the campground property there is a white farmhouse that was built by Eng’s son, William Bunker in 1900.  Occasional tours are offered to groups interested in viewing the old homeplace. The campground owner, Benny East, is the great-great grandson of Eng.  His mother, Ruby Bunker East, was born and raised in the farmhouse along with her 5 sisters.  Benny’s daughter’s, Kali and Lakin East can also be found working at the campground and are great-great-great granddaughters of Eng.  ~ from the Campground website

Well, you all know by now that this information prompted much research!  The information here was taken from several websites and pieced together.  They managed to do incredible things despite their ‘disability’ and the prejudices at the time – even more so that they’d encounter today.

Chang (on the right) and Eng as adults in America and children in Siam

1. Chang and Eng were the “original Siamese twins”. They were born in 1811 in fishing village 60 miles from Bangkok in Siam (later renamed Thailand in 1939). Their father was a Chinese fisherman and their 35-year-old mother was half-Chinese, half-Malay.
2. The two midwives who helped at the birth were horrified. Mom probably saved their lives by untwisting the ligament — which had been connected to a single umbilical cord — and moving the babies so they lay staring into each other’s eyes. She named them In and Jun (anglicized to Eng and Chang). Chang — on the left — was always slightly shorter and the upper half of his body arched away from his brother.
3. Their mother encouraged them to exercise, stretching their connecting ligament so that it gradually grew to more than five inches — enough for them to run, swim and handle a boat. Crucially, they were able to bow 18 times, as custom dictated, when they were presented to the King of Siam, Rama III.
4. They spent their life helping their family to sell preserved ducks’ eggs until they were spotted by a British merchant when they were adolescents.
5. Robert Hunter at first thought the twins were ‘some strange animal’ when he saw them swimming in a river. But he recognized their commercial potential and easily persuaded their impoverished family that the twins should accompany him back to the West and be exhibited as a public curiosity. They agreed but the king, who wanted to show them off at court, was reluctant.
6. It took five years and the help of an American sea captain, Abel Coffin, to win over the king, who was bribed with a telescope and a troupe of temple dancers. The twins’ mother — whose husband had died when the boys were young — received $500 for contracting her sons to Hunter and Coffin for 30 months.
7. On board Captain Coffin’s ship as they sailed for Massachusetts with a translator in 1829, the 17-year-old twins showed that they were bright and extremely coordinated. They quickly picked up the rudiments of English and could scurry up the mast as fast as any sailor aboard.
8. In Boston they were exhibited as The Siamese Double Boys and were an immediate sensation.

In theatres and halls across the U.S. they performed for four hours a day, six days a week, entertaining thousands with somersaults, backflips, an uncanny ability at draughts (checkers) and chess, and their prodigious strength — they could carry a 20-stone man. (280 pounds!)  And they were paid well for their work.

In pamphlets such as this one from 1834, Chang and Eng described their Siamese culture more than their physical uniqueness

They toured the nation using posters such as this to announce their local engagements

9. Not many conjoined twins had survived for more than a few days, so doctors and scientists clamored to see them too. It suited their promoters that they were examined, albeit often invasively, by some of America’s finest doctors. Those doctors’ conclusion — that women and children could view them safely ‘without harm or offence’ — was perfect titillation to include on the show’s advertising posters.  (FYI, on my own personal note – apparently, the thought at that time was that women’s health could be influenced by what they looked at; in other words, if a pregnant woman looked at conjoined twins, her baby could be born that way.  I’m of the opinion that while men were very intelligent at that time, they lacked common sense.)
10. Britain wanted to see them too, so they sailed there in 1830. In London, some of the world’s leading physicians were waiting to examine them. At 5ft 2in tall, the twins were now fully grown and their connecting ligament was about the size and roundness of a child’s arm.
    

    Portrait of Chang and Eng in 1830 by Irvine (in the collection of The Hunterian Museum / Royal College of Surgeons of London)

11. Each one appeared to sense when the other was tickled or ate an unpleasant-tasting food, but he couldn’t hear a whisper in the other’s ear or feel a pinch on his arm. Although both were clearly intelligent, the hardier Chang was dominant and Eng would rarely speak out of turn. Eng liked to stay up all night playing poker, Chang was an alcoholic (the affects of which never affected Eng)
12. They returned to the US in 1831 (now 20 years old) and hired their own manager. They spent the next 7 years on the road, and while you might be thinking ‘Elephant Man’, they were far from that. They were natural showmen and were always treated with respect.
13. At 27, they met and befriended James Calloway, a young doctor from Wilkesboro, a remote township in North Carolina. Who invited them to come home with him when he discovered they were tired of the show life.
14. North Carolina was a slave state but under U.S. law, the twins counted as white. They became U.S. citizens, borrowing the name surname ‘Bunker’ from the man standing behind them in line when they realized they needed a last name.
15. They opened a store and bought 200 acres (eventually expanding to 2,000), branched into farming (corn and hogs), built a spacious home for themselves and became slave owners, buying 33 to work their new plantation.
16. At age 31, the men began pursuing wives – the daughters of a neighboring farmer, David Yates. And an unusual romantic conundrum had arisen. Over several years, Chang and the slimmer, more attractive sister, Adelaide, had fallen in love. Eng and her sister, Sarah, had not. Marrying two sisters made sense, however, as Victorian propriety would not have tolerated a woman sharing such intimacy with any other female. It took Sarah five years to agree to marry Eng and both couples were finely married by a Baptist preacher in Yates’s living room in 1843. The foursome then moved into the house, where the marital bed had been enlarged and strengthened.  They had 21 children between them.  At some point, the brothers built a second house a mile away from the first – Sarah and her children stayed in one, Adelaide and her children stayed at the other.  Chang and Eng would spend three nights at each for the rest of their lives.
    

    This photograph shows them with their wives, Sarah and Adelaide, the Yates sisters and two of their children.

     

    

    This family portrait from the 1860s shows Chang and Eng with their wives and 18 of their 22 children. It also includes Grace Gates, one of the 33 slaves on their plantation.

    

    Grace Gates, one of their slaves and caregiver for all the 21 children.
    No wonder she’s so sour-faced!

17. They did exceptionally well, until the Civil War, when they lost a fortune in loans they took in Confederate currency. Ruined and bitter at 54 years old (1865), Chang and Eng had to go back on the road as ‘curiosities’.
18. In 1868, they joined P.T. Barnum and toured Europe.
    

    This picture and the next go together as one large flier

    

    This advertisement, probably from late 1860, reflects the variety of ways that the American Museum’s human exhibits reflected the antebellum era’s politically and socially charged issues of race. The conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker appeared for a limited engagement, along with two of their children; visitors could gaze at the men and their family members, and also purchase a pamphlet detailing their lives or a lithograph illustration of the twins. At the same time, museum-goers could view the “white negroes,” children with a pigmentation deficiency born to African-American parents. A third racially provocative exhibit was the “What Is It,” the racially ambiguous “living nondescript,” allegedly discovered in Africa and described by Barnum as a “man monkey.”

    

    

    This and the next picture go together as one large flier announcing their last appearance

    

    I’m sorry. I know you can’t actually read it. It’s the best I could do. : (

    

    A map of their travels

19. In 1870, Chang suffered a stroke down the side closest to his brother. Eng carried Chang’s now useless leg in a sling as Chang leaned on a crutch.
20. In January 1874 at age 62, Chang caught bronchitis. Two days later, Eng woke up early and called for help. His brother had died.  “‘Then I am going!’ cried Eng, and began twisting in panic in bed. Sweating profusely and saying that he was in great pain, he told his wife: ‘I am dying.’ Drawing his brother to him, he uttered his final words: ‘May the Lord have mercy on my soul!’  By the time the doctor arrived, ready to cut the twins apart, Eng was dead, just two-and-a-half hours after his brother passed away. A post-mortum examination, conducted by doctors who described the twins as ‘the monster now before us’, showed that Chang may have had a cerebral clot but Eng appeared literally to have died of fright, overcome by the realization that he was attached to a dead man.”

21. It has since been determined that at the time, they would have surely died if an attempt had been made to separate them, but with modern medicine, they could have been.

According to the University of Maryland Medical Center one in every 200,000 live twin births worldwide are conjoined, though 40 to 60 percent are stillborn and 35 percent of those who survive only live for a day.