The Georgia Wonder

Lulu Hurst was famous as the Georgia Wonder or the Electric Girl in the mid-1880s. Born in 1869, she was a 14 year old living in rural Georgia when she claimed to have heard rapping and popping in her bedroom one night after a severe thunder storm. After the storm, she touched a chair - and when someone sat upon it, they were thrown across the room. She seemed to have acquired some strange, perhaps electrical powers. Her fame spread through Georgia and then all across the country.

In 1884 she toured the eastern United States, amazing audiences with her strength and ability to throw large men across the stage and even make chairs fly through the air like acrobats. In the picture above, Lulu performs her chair act, in which she lifted a man seated in a chair right up off the floor.

The picture at the right, below, is a photograph of Lulu's cane act, in which the luckless man holding the opposite end of the cane is hurled onto the floor.

In her most celebrated feat, Lulu held one end of an umbrella and male volunteers from the audience attempted to throw her off balance by grabbing the other end of the umbrella. She then proceeded to flip the hapless man onto the floor with her amazing strength. The umbrella had it even worse than the gentlemen - it was usually in pieces by the end of the evening - as were the nerves of the volunteers.

She performed at Wallack's Theater in Manhattan in July 1884, and at the Brooklyn Theater across the river in August. She held one end of an umbrella and male volunteers from the audience attempted to throw her off balance by grabbing the other end of the umbrella.

The New York Times reported that women in the Wallack's audience "have gone home to Connecticut or to Dutchess county, where they are breaking furniture and tossing deacons and Methodist ministers like chaff before the wind. This must be stopped, or there will be no such thing as safety outside a monastery."

It doesn't take much feminist scholarship to work out what a threat this strong young lady - and her female admirers - was to the men she tossed to the ground on stage via her umbrella and a flip of her hand.

Lulu's performances in Brooklyn were heralded with a series of detailed articles which alternated between satire and amused admiration for her strength.There were several eminent men in the audience on August 4th, including local politicians, a Congressman and "a group of magnetic young men." Also present was a certain Mr. Blish - who some readers may remember as the victim of the Peekskill Murder of 1891, seven years in the future. (You can read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of the Peekskill Murder Case, here.)

The Brooklyn audience watched the curtain rise. It revealed Lulu in pink silk, her father ("raw boned" and sandy-whiskered) and Lulu's manager (and future husband) Paul Atkinson, sitting on "common looking chairs.". Lulu was described by the Eagle reporter as plain and rather stout, with dark hair cut in bangs and long curls at the back. Much was made in the papers of Lulu's flashy outfits - bright red, or pink, or yellow, decorated with "brilliants" or large corsages of roses.

Mr. Atkinson called for volunteers, but none came forward. He said that over in New York, policemen had to hold back the eager gentlemen - what was the matter with the folks in Brooklyn? Finally a young man with a "cocoanut shaped head" and some others, crept forward.

One of the timid young men gripped the famous silk umbrella by the handle. Then Lulu took hold of the other end and put her palm on the middle, and was able to first hit him on the head with the umbrella and then throw him "violently" to the floor. Then she did this with a second man, but "how she managed to whack the young man on the head was not made clear."

The idea seems to have been that Lulu "electrified" the umbrella. She did similar tricks with billiard cues and canes, with the same unhappy results for the men. In the second part of her show, she touched the backs of chairs that the men sat in and caused them to be lifted up from the floor. A few of them seemed to be lifted an inch or two. The final trick of causing a chair to fly around when she touched it, was not successful at all.

At the end of the evening Lulu seemed, the Eagle reporter wrote, to be as fresh as ever. The men, on the other hand, looked like they had been carrying bins of coal all day.

It was all over by 1886. Lulu was tired of touring. She settled down with Atkinson, whom she had married while touring. As one medical journal put it: "Miss Lulu Hurst, of Georgia, has lost her magnetic power, but, it is said, still retains strength to hold on to $50,000 made by her exhibitions."

However, she gained public notice a decade later, in 1897, by publishing her autobiography. It explained the secrets that she had used to achieve her stage performances. Barry H. Wiley's book, The Georgia Wonder: Lulu Hurst and the Secret That Shocked America, is here at L&L Publishing (this is going on my to-read list right now).


I am extremely grateful to the New Georgia Encyclopedia for the wonderful photograph of Lulu with her parents, William E. and Sarah Evelyn (Wood) Hurst and her manager and husband Paul Atkinson - and the equally wonderful pictures of Lulu's cane and chair acts.

NOTE: Check out this great band, Georgia Wonder, named for Lulu - I think that she'd be very pleased!

SOURCES

From the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

"The Georgia Wonder's Muscle," Jul. 12, 1884, p. 2.
"The So-Called Georgia Wonder," Jul. 13, 1884, p. 1.
"Muscle, Magnetism and Faith Cures," Jul. 20, 1884, p. 6.
"Lissome Lulu With Us," Aug. 3, 1884, p. 12.
"Lulu's Bang," Aug. 5, 1884, p. 2.
"Lulu Hurst," Aug. 7, 1884, p. 2.
"The Wonder," Aug. 8, 1884, p. 2.
"Lulu's Power," Aug. 9, 1884, p. 2.

"Lulu Hurst's Many Dresses," New York Times, Jul. 20, 1884, p. 5.

St. Louis Clinical Journal, Vol. 8 (1885), p. 469.

Medical Press and Library Association, St. Louis, Weekly Medical Review, Vol. 10 (1884), p. 177.

William E. Hurst household, 1880 US Census, Cedartown, Polk, Georgia; FHL film # 1254161, T9-0161, p. 283D [Parents William E. age 35, Clerk in Hardware Store b TN, Sarah E. age 34 b GA; Lulu is listed as age 11, b TN, attending school; siblings William 9, John 5 and Mabel 2 are all At Home and all born in GA]

The New Georgia Encyclopedia

"Little Lulu" article at Blithering Antiquity