Dixie Haygood, The Georgia Magnet. This picture accompanied her obit.
In 1861 Dixie Annie Jarratt was born in Milledgeville. In 1884 she probably watched Lulu Hurst perform in Milledgeville’s opera house and her life was transformed. Days later Dixie trod the same stage, performing the same tricks. An editor from the Augusta Evening News announced that she “tried everything the celebrated Lulu Hurst does and very much more. The umbrella ‘trick’ was done to perfection, and the writer of this, who weighs 210 pounds and prides himself upon the development of his muscles, could not hold the same, but had to go wherever she willed, sometimes towards and sometimes from her. Many other things she did which Lulu Hurst never attempted to do.”
Dixie was shorter than Lulu, weighed under 100 pounds, and was “fragile, very youthful in appearance, slight, rather dark with fine delicate features, a kind genial expression, very intelligent and attractive with honest, tender eyes,” described a newspaper.
A hoard of Lulu imitators had sprang up, but Dixie was the real deal. When her husband was shot and killed during a heated prohibition debate in 1886, Dixie was forced to enter show business to support her three young children, soon appearing in many states and Canada.
Four men, weighing 600 to 1,000 pounds, would pile onto a chair and Dixie, touching the back of the chair with open hands, easily raised it above the floor. She could resist the force of multiple strong men from lifting her off the floor.
By 1890 Dixie had taken a stage name, Annie Abbott, and was called the Little Georgia Magnet. In Virginia she was examined by Dr. Lewis G. Pedigo of the American Society for Psychical Research. There Dixie held a pool cue horizontally in front of her and balanced on one foot. Four strapping men could not disturb her balance. With the cue resting in her open hand the men could not force it down. Within two hours Dixie had vanquished “the strength of a dozen vigorous, athletic men” but was found to be “perfectly fresh and free from fatigue…”
At Jacob’s Theater Dixie wowed New York City, trouncing strongman Eugene Sandow, who said, “I put forth strength enough to lift eight men clear off the floor, yet I failed to shift this little fragile creature one inch from her position. So too with the attempt to drive her back or force the (pool) stick to the floor…The power possessed by Miss Abbott is weird and wonderful.”
Dixie departed the country for a lengthy European tour in the fall of 1891. At London’s Alhambra Music Hall John B. Verity felt her arm as she lifted two chairs holding six men. Although finding her muscles inert, he “felt a vibration through my hand somewhat similar to what I have on occasions experienced when near a powerful dynamo.” She performed before capacity crowds for six weeks, earning a reported $2,400.
When Queen Victoria asked Dixie to locate a missing pearl, she did so.
Dixie traveled to Germany in March 1892, where she received gifts from Emperor Wilhelm, and continued the tour to Egypt, Hungary, and Italy.
Dixie wrote the Milledgeville Union Recorder in September 1893 to describe part of her act: “I take a small boy and he places his hands in mine gently and after having him look me in the eyes for some moments the gentlemen find it impossible to raise him from the floor, then a little longer and I let go of him, stand entirely off from him and still he cannot be lifted while I have his attention…Now whether I hypnotize the child or not I cannot say, or if the gentlemen are deprived of their power to lift I cannot explain, nor can anyone who sees the experiment.”
Some feared her power, she wrote. “In some places here in this country the people are actually afraid of me, and rush upon the stage and take the child from me…some of them say I am possessed of the Devil, and others say I am another saint…”
Dixie and her son Charles traveled to Russia, where they remained for five months. At a private show the Czar “tried to show that he could do the same things as mother could do but failed,” Charles wrote. “That night my mother dreamed she saw the Czar in a railroad wreck and in the morning she sent me with a note to the palace…The Czar intended to go away that day but when he got the note he put off the trip (and) the train he was going on was blown up. He sent a lot of presents to my mother and some to me. We could have stayed there the rest of our lives.”
Dixie continued to Constantinople, where the Sultan attended a show “but did not smile,” Charles wrote, apparently because he believed her “a witch…possessed by the devil,” the Sultan informed Dixie’s manager. She shuttled between Germany and Russia a number of times.
Dixie returned to the U.S. in mid-1893 and again toured America. In 1896 she married Frank B. Baylor and retired to his home in New Jersey. After writing of Dixie’s career, Charles died at the age of fifteen and was buried beside his father in Milledgeville.
In 1904, after an eight-year retirement, a forty-three year old Dixie returned to the stage, storming America once again. Her final performance occurred in Milledgeville in 1911. Dixie fell ill and died on November 21, 1915. She was buried in Memory Hill Cemetery, her grave unmarked until 2001.
Susan and Hugh Harrington, a married couple retired from Georgia College and State University, are the modern biographers of Dixie. They wrote a comprehensive article about the woman for The Georgia Historical Quarterly, Fall 2002, Vol.LXXXVI, No. 3, pages 423-428 and in May released a book on the topic, Annie Abbott:”The Little Georgia Magnet” and the True Story of Dixie Haygood. They have taught drama students to imitate Dixie’s tricks.
“Basically it’s in leverage and position,” Susan believes. “You have to find the right angle to hold the parts of the body, the arms in particular…it’s called resistance magic.”
From Weird Georgia (Sterling Press, 2006).
http://brownsguides.com/weirdgeorgia/20 ... ia-magnet/
