Wedding of General Tom Thumb to Mercy Warren (1863)
P.T. Barnum knew how to put on a good show. When two of his featured stars, Charles S. Stratton, known as General Tom Thumb, married Mercy Lavinia Warren, he hopped on the publicity wagon and turned the event into a money-making opportunity. He sold photographs of the wedding under the title, “The Fairy Wedding.” The church was crowded to the point that police patrolled the wedding to maintain order.
While most wedding receptions at the time were quiet events celebrated at home, the Stratton-Warren wedding had their reception at the Metropolitan hotel. Tickets to the reception sold for $75 apiece. The wedding and reception, documented in detail by the media outlets across the country. It was a celebrity wedding to distract the public, if only for a moment, from the Civil War raging in the United States at the time.
