New Mount Airy museum tells story of the original Siamese Twins (2024)

MOUNT AIRY — The collection was amassed one artifact at a time.

Someone donated a flute; another a crutch; yet another an iron. Beth Hinson contributed a ladder-back chair for two.

When you have 1,500 living descendants, as conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker do, a call to family members for treasures and heirlooms can bring in quite a haul, enough to fill a museum.

And that’s exactly where many of them are displayed. The new Siamese Twins Museum in Mount Airy opened on July 1.

“This is where the chair needs to be, where it needs to live,” said Hinson, a great-great daughter of Chang Bunker. She brought the chair up from Columbia, S.C., about a week after the museum opened.

The thoughtfully curated museum tells the story of the original Siamese Twins, from their humble childhood in Siam (now Thailand) to carnival show curiosities to intrepid businessmen to Surry County farmers who married sisters and fathered 21 children between them (that’s a story onto itself).

Bound together by a 5-1/2 inch strip of flesh at their chests, the Bunker twins were so famous in 19th century America that Mark Twain penned a satiric essay about them, and when they died, four hours apart in Eng’s home outside of Mount Airy in 1874, their obituary appeared in The New York Times.

In the ensuing decades, their celebrity and remarkable tale faded into history, even among some of their descendants.

“To be honest, I first realized how neat it was to have ancestors like that was when I was in fifth grade and had to do a project on somebody famous. I had no idea who to do it on and my mom said, ‘You could do it on your great-great grandfather, Eng.’ And I was like, ‘What?’” recalled Robin Craver, who grew up in Mount Airy and now lives in Raleigh. “I had heard about them, knew they were Siamese twins but when you’re younger, you think every child has something like that. I didn’t realize it was a unique thing.”

Alex Sink, a descendent of Chang Bunker, said the twins were not a topic of conversation outside of her family.

“I had a very puritan grandmother who refused to let us mention them in her presence,” said Sink, who now lives in Florida.

A series of biographies through the years slowly revived interest in Chang and Eng. About 35 years ago, descendants from across the country began congregating at an annual reunion in Mount Airy to celebrate their family. Representatives from the Thai government often come to these reunions to strengthen cultural ties and express their own pride in Chang and Eng, whose arrival in America in 1829 made them among the first Asian immigrants.

Some descendants, including Craver, have even traveled to Thailand to better understand Chang and Eng and reconnect with their heritage.

A descendant of Eng and the longtime executive director of the Surry Arts Council, Tanya Jones has known for years that the twins’ extraordinary lives were worthy of a museum.

Years ago, city leaders took a look at “place-based assets” — those interesting, quirky and historical features in communities that have the potential to draw tourists and bring money to local merchants. The loss of hundreds of textile, tobacco and furniture jobs in Mount Airy made this inventory of assets particularly important to the local economy.

Luckily for Mount Airy, it already had a big one in place. As the childhood home of Andy Griffith, the town served as the setting for Mayberry.

Mount Airy has played up that asset well, with a festival, Mayberry-themed shops and restaurants and patrol-car tours of relevant sites.

The city can also stake a claim to Chang and Eng Bunker’s story.

“They played a huge role in our local history as well as our nation’s history,” Jones said.

As Jones walked around the museum in early July, Darrell and Sheila Revels sauntered through the museum, the sheriff-badge stickers that they got while taking a patrol-car tour of the Mayberry sites still affixed to their shirts. Big Andy Griffith fans, the couple from Gaffney, S.C., had long wanted to visit Mount Airy. While researching the area, the Siamese Twins Museum caught their eye.

“We came to see all the sites,” Sheila Revels said. “I’m a medical person, and the Siamese Twins had a tough life.”

For years, the city had a small exhibit dedicated to the Bunkers in the lower level of the Andy Griffith Museum on Rockford Street. But the breadth of the twins’ story demanded a bigger space. No longer conjoined with Andy Griffith, Chang and Eng now have their own museum, just across the street. Combination tickets are available for $16.

The 2,500-square-foot museum starts with an exhibit that aims to place visitors in 19th century Siam. The sons of a Chinese fisherman, Chang and Eng were born in 1811 in a village along the Mae Klong River. Industrious from the outset, they raised ducks and sold their eggs from their boat on a floating market.

One day, Robert Hunter, a Scottish trader, spied them swimming in the river. Initially confused by what he was seeing, Hunter saw value in these human anomalies, and in 1829, he and his partner paid the twins’ mother $500 for the right to showcase them around the world and return them in five years. They were 17-years-old and would never see their mother or home again.

Other exhibits at the museum also pay homage to their Thai roots including a replica of a Buddhist temple and a framed letter to Jones from a religious scholar confirming that a palm leaf manuscript that Chang and Eng took with them to America is the first Buddhist text on American soil.

“The fact is, the history of Buddhism in America begins with your family,” the letter reads.

Other artifacts include photocopies of pamphlets and stories advertising some of the earliest shows with Chang and Eng. Not surprisingly, these advertisem*nts exaggerated their features in racially insensitive ways.

Chang and Eng were an immediate sensation on their early U.S. tours, with people lining up to gawk at them. It helped that the twins were natural showmen who told jokes, played badminton and turned somersaults during their performances.

“I’ve heard it said that if there were a People magazine back then, they would’ve been featured two or three times a year because they were so engaging and famous,” Sink said.

They were also remarkably savvy, recognizing early on that their managers were controlling their destiny and bilking their profits. They eventually freed themselves from their contract and managed their own careers. During one of their performances, a doctor from Wilkes County invited them to visit him.

The Bunkers fell in love with the area, with some suggesting that the mountains and streams reminded them of their home in Siam. Settling first in Traphill, where they met and married the Yates sisters, they moved to Mount Airy, bought land with earnings from their shows and transitioned into agrarian life, which meant enslaving people.

By the end of the Civil War, Chang and Eng had 32 enslaved people, a fact that the museum addresses in an exhibit devoted to their lives in Mount Airy.

“It has to be acknowledged as a practice that was inhumane, which it was,” Sink said.

The museum flows chronologically, with timelines and interactive displays. There’s a replica of Chang’s front porch and the original log that Chang and Eng hollowed out and used to cure meat.

The Civil War bankrupted Chang and Eng and forced them to go back on the road, traveling to Europe for months at a time. Chang became sickly around this time, and in 1874, he died in Eng’s home. Eng, fully aware of his fate, succumbed four hours later.

They are buried at White Plains Christian Church outside of Mount Airy on land they formerly owned.

So many myths surround her ancestors that Jones was determined to set the record straight, using as many primary sources as possible.

“I was passionate about telling their story accurately,” she said.

Descendants toured the museum in July while in Mount Airy for the annual reunion.

Craver said she hopes visitors will appreciate the bigger story of her ancestors, one that goes beyond their medical anomaly.

“I hope they see and appreciate that they overcame so many hardships,” she said. “They lived the American dream. They learned a language, assimilated to the culture and basically, with very very little, they became model citizens in the community.”

Sink sees their story as one of resilience.

“They turned their disability into an incredible asset,” she said.