What’s the secret behind a 15-year-old girl visiting the major cities of the nation, leaving audiences amazed at her powers and then retiring at age 16 to lead a long and normal life?
This somewhat fanciful illustration of Lulu Hurst’s powers is from the cover of her 1897 autobiography, “Lulu Hurst (the Georgia Wonder) Writes Her Autobiography, and for the First Time Explains and Demonstrates the Great Secret of Her Marvelous Power.”
"Sir, I think I have grown stronger. I discovered this in Washington one night, when I sent a Senator weighing 250 pounds rolling under a piano twenty feet from where I was standing.”
The quote is from Lulu Hurst, in the Carrollton [Georgia] Free Press of September 5, 1884—datelined Chattanooga, Tennessee—being interviewed upon her return to North Georgia after a six-month tour of the northeastern U.S., where Hurst regularly performed what she called her “mysterious magnitism.”
Lulu Hurst was 15 years old, and had returned home with “about $40,000, including expenses.”
That’s about $1.2 million in today’s dollars.
And what was it that brought crowds in New York City and Washington, D.C.—and later San Francisco as well as Boston, Denver, Chicago, Milwaukee, New Orleans and cities in Texas, Ohio and other states—to see a poised, 5’6”, 120-pound girl dressed most often in a simple black velvet dress?
Explanations range from an electrical storm to mysticism, from mysterious powers to simple principles of physics, from the susceptibility of a nation just becoming acquainted with electricity to plain brute strength.
Press coverage from the days of her fame through much more recent times delights in speculating and extolling:
From the Washington Star, June 11, 1883: “She overcomes numbers of strong men by her touch of umbrellas, canes, billiard cues, chairs, etc., made to perform miraculous acts by her touch . . .”
Lulu Hurst demonstrates her technique of overpowering and lifting three men on a chair.
From the same newspaper, June 28, 1883, as quoted from astronomer and mathematician Simon Newcomb, speaking on the complete lack of signs of physical exertion from Lulu Hurst after her feats: “I cannot explain it. I leave that for psychologists to do.”
From the New York Star, June 11, 1884, quoted from famed actress Lily Langtree after she had been “flung into the air, turned a sommersalt and tumbled down a flight of stairs,” but was unhurt: “Why, it’s wonderful. It was like a flash of lightning followed by a thunderbolt . . . I am fully satisfied. It is indeed the most wonderful thing I ever saw.”
From the March 30, 1958 edition of the Atlanta Journal: “Is it animal magnetism? Is it psychology? Perhaps it is a little of both.”
Lulu Hurst was born in Cedar Valley, Georgia, in 1869, near the southern end of the Blue Ridge range, in Polk County.
Her unusual powers ostensibly came to realization on September 18, 1883, when a severe thunderstorm overran the valley. According to the autobiography she published in 1897, the suspected origin of her mysterious power was “a night of storm, terror, and mystery.” Lulu expounded that “an inexplicable vein of electricity was popping around in the bed,” with hickory nuts flying from the trees into the room that she and her cousin were sharing, and both clothing and rocks moving from one part of the house to another.
She asserted that she was, from that night onward, infused with powers that likely migrated her name from Lula to Lulu, as in what a lulu! and which soon earned her the nickname, The Georgia Wonder.
At the time Lulu Hurst made her appearance the American landscape was rife with talk of mysticism and wonder, as witness popular books from the day: “How to Become Clairvoyant; A Handbook of Psychology, Mesmerism, and Clairvoyance” and “The Magician’s Guide; or Conjuring Made Easy.”
In short, the nation was ready for magic. In the years of 1884-1885, Lulu Hurst became a household name, traveling more than 20,000 miles throughout much of the United States. Her likeness was used to promote a number of products including soap as well as tobacco and cigars. And she was a favorite for newspaper coverage.
The Rome Daily Bulletin highlighted Lulu’s visit to Rome, Georgia, extolling her exhibition as many of Rome’s elite—“Mayor King, Colonel Harper and Dr. Tigner among them”—were bandied about by Lulu’s powers. The items employed during her exhibitions—chairs, pool cues, and umbrellas—“acted as living objects heaving and tossing these staid individuals about the stage.”
In a step toward performing in larger and larger cities, she performed at DeGives Opera House in Atlanta, where she amazed the packed house by her “lifting a chair laden with three hefty males six inches from the floor with just the palms of her hands touching upon the chair.”
In another demonstration, Fulton Colville, an Atlanta businessman, was directed to simply hold a wooden chair tightly against his chest. As Lulu stepped forward and laid her hands ever so lightly upon the chair, it began moving around the stage. The audience howled with laughter at the vision of Colville’s feet moving frantically delivering a dervish dance all over the stage, while unsuccessfully attempting to hold the chair still.
Speculation as to the root of her powers continued as her performances spread northeast. During an appearance at Wallacks Theater in New York City, one gentleman voiced loudly his take: “She’s got electricity stored in her shoes.” He was no sooner laughed back to his seat when another spoke up; his opinion—the stage was electrified. During a July 23, 1884, exhibition in Boston, many in the audience attributed her powers to just brute strength, while a 10-year-old lad confidently said it was the battery hidden in her dress.
Lulu Hurst performs her “electric” wonders against a team of strong men. Illustration is from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, July 26, 1884.
Although some in attendance were avowed skeptics before her performance, after viewing Lulu’s feats “all the gentlemen on the stage gave a public expression of opinion concerning the Wonderful Power, the unanimous verdict being that the Power was one which could not be understood.”
Her stage presence was consistently described as elegant and calm, with her personal beauty and mesmerizing, hypnotic eyes as central to her ability to capture audiences. Important as well was the consistent presence of Paul M. Atkinson, who is described as “a few years older,” and who served as stage manager for the shows.
But the whirlwind tours lasted only two years. In the fall of 1885, after two performances in Knoxville, Tennessee, with numbers wanting to attend so crushing that “half of those seeking entrance to see her were turned away,” the Georgia Wonder ended her career. After those shows, she informed her parents that she was retiring. Her father tried to talk her out of it, but could not. Speculation was that she was simply tired of performing, and had earned enough money.
She did not provide a reason for several years: She “did not want to be looked upon as some abnormal, quasi-supernatural being.” She felt her power was “aiding superstition among people.” She also said she wanted to continue her education, at least in part to learn more about her own strange powers.
And there was another force at work: After years of denials of romantic feelings for manager Paul Atkinson, she suddenly announced plans to marry him.
She enrolled at what was then Shorter Female College in Rome, Georgia, but soon left it to prepare for the marriage.
News of the wedding plans brought almost as much newspaper coverage as had her act, complete with worries over Paul succumbing to electrocution upon becoming a happy groom.
The couple lived initially in Chattanooga, but soon moved to Paul’s hometown of Madison, Georgia, where they lived a “quiet life of relative luxury.”
Lulu’s 1897 autobiography was in two parts: the first recounting her powers and her career, and the second revealing that her “supernatural” powers actually arose from two well-recognized laws of physics, in the form of her innate understanding of leverage and deflection of force.
A 1928 article in Popular Mechanics concluded that her tricks “were based almost solely on the pivot-and-fulcrum theorem of physics.”
Lulu Hurst Atkinson died in Madison on May 13, 1950, at the age of 80. Her husband Paul, with whom she had two sons and who was a respected state legislator, had died in 1931 after a long illness.
Want to Know More?
Google “Lulu Hurst” and a bounty of information comes up, including many pieces from major newspapers. One exhaustive, if a bit of-its-times piece is a 1971 article in Georgia Historical Quarterly—"Lulu Hurst, ‘Georgia Wonder’”—written by E. Merton Coulter, who is identified as professor emeritus, University of Georgia: jstor.org/stable/40579188?seq=7
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