Sylvia Hardy was always a bit unusual, but growing up on a Wilton farm in the 1800s, family and friends could never have predicted her future.

She was a twin, which probably accounts for her low birth weight of five pounds. Unfortunately, her brother died when the pair was only four months old.

Sylvia was not only the healthier of the two, she was already walking by the surprisingly young age of eight months. She was advanced for her age mentally as well. Legend has it that she started attending school before she had even turned 3.

When Sylvia was 7, tragedy struck her family when her father died. Her mother, unable to support Sylvia on her own, sent her to the Eatons, a wealthier Wilton family. As a child, Sylvia was small for age and very slim. In fact, her classmates teased her about her little hands; they called them “bird claws.”

But when Sylvia was 12, she started to grow. Many adolescents “shoot up” at this age, but Sylvia was different. She didn’t stop. Soon she was taller than all her sisters, then taller than her mother, and even taller than her father had been. When she was 15, she left the Eaton house and boarded with a succession of other local families.

She kept growing.

Eventually, her mother remarried, and Sylvia moved in with her and her new stepfather.

She kept growing.

Sylvia herself did not marry after she finished school, but she kept growing. By the age of 21 she had reached her full height. Reports vary about just how tall she was. Some say she was more than 7 feet tall. Some describe her as “near 8 feet high.”

Local writer John Willard, who knew Sylvia personally, scoffed at those figures. “I believe the public would like to see a reliable account, after seeing so many exaggerated accounts of her,” he wrote in the Maine Farmer in 1867. Sylvia’s full height was 6 feet, 8 inches, he asserted. “The truth in this case is large enough,” he said. “It needs no stretching.”

She became known as “the Maine Giantess.” And while Willard reports that she was “of modest and retiring habits,” she was eventually persuaded to join P.T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York City. Here she was put on display, along with the Albino, the Bearded Lady and the Fat Girl. With this entourage she traveled across the country and to Cuba.

Sylvia may not have liked appearing in public as an oddity. A New York Times review of one of her appearances describes her expression as “perplexed.”

Simply walking down a street was probably difficult for her. Willard notes that anyone seeing her for the first time reacted with open “astonishment.” And it’s easy to believe that, like most of us, she would have felt self-conscious about being so tall.

Yet her height enabled her to make a good living. In later years she bought a house in Wilton village for her sister and mother, who once again was a widow. After losing her father and bouncing between a variety of families to earn her keep, Sylvia was probably happy to have some financial stability in her adult years.

Life as a giant couldn’t have been easy. Yet it was her height that gave her a living and the opportunity to see the world beyond her hometown.

Luann Yetter teaches writing at the University of Maine at Farmington.