In 1884 the people of Georgia thought a Polk County girl had special powers, magnetic, electric or something more magical. Neither magnetism or electricity was understood back then, and spiritualism had an enthusiastic following.
Mattie Lee Price must have felt that she had special powers too. She could do all the feats of strength after having witnessed the older girl’s act but once.
A few important men of Cartersville witnessed Mattie lift and move people and things which seemed way beyond her capabilities. There was money to be made, so these prominent men made a contract with the girl’s father for one year and ten thousand dollars. They would show her in dime museums and opera houses throughout the northeast. She would be famous. They would become even wealthier.
They set out for the big cities, the illiterate 14-year-old, 90-pound girl, her father, and a few of the investors. The stage was set. Mattie, with no schooling in anything other than cotton picking and housekeeping, was pushed out onto a stage to be poked and prodded by strangers questioning her abilities.
Things didn’t work out as they had planned. The Georgia men went home in embarrassment and cut ties with the girl and her father. But the mold had been set. Mattie would continue her act, traveling all over the United States, Canada and Great Britain in dime museums, theaters and circuses. They called her a miracle and a fraud. Harry Houdini witnessed her abilities and deemed her the best of what would was later dubbed “The Georgia Wonder” girls. She was on Barnum & Bailey posters, in the route books, and even was center ring act in a circus in 1894.
It wasn’t her fault she got forgotten, she was all on her own, a woman in the 1800’s with little power and even less experience to serve her. Her remarkable story is here in “Mattie Lee Price, the Forgotten Georgia Wonder.”
Excerpt
Mattie had little or no education and therefore had no formal knowledge of fulcrum and lever science. The stunts that she pulled off were intuitively achieved and thus if she were unable to concentrate on the task at hand, she would be incapable of succeeding. However, even highly educated scientists and researchers seemed unable to explain just how she could lift a chair with nearly 700 pounds sitting in it.
Houdini described Mattie as, “barely ninety pounds, and had the sickly look of a ‘consumptive.’” He continued with, “Yet this weakling was able to perform feats requiring super human strength and endurance from either good spirits or the devil himself.” (The Secret Life of Houdini, Kalush and Sloman, pp. 27–28, 2006.) Naturally Houdini understood the principles behind Mattie’s act, but he still admired her. To be so fragile and yet able to lift men in chairs and twist hickory sticks out of their hands was, well, kind of “freakish.” So yes, Mattie was one of the “freaks” in spite of the fact that she had all of her limbs and none extra.
