Big Pat Bane, The Tallest Soldier in the Civil War

-This is a guest post by Candice Buchanan, a reference librarian in the History and Genealogy Section.

William Patterson Bane, the Greene County Giant, was almost certainly the tallest soldier in the Civil War, earning an almost mythical place in popular culture of late 19th-century America.

At a towering 6 feet, 9 inches, the cheerful, blue-eyed Pennsylvania native appeared otherworldly. Clothes never fit Big Pat. His feet came out of his shoes. Crowds swarmed. Children ran and laughed and gaped. He led parades. Fellow soldiers, particularly at reunions, gawped and guffawed.

“A continuous shout ran along the line as the giant of Pennsylvania moved by,” wrote the Daily Public Ledger in Maysville, Kentucky, in September of 1893, recounting Bane’s progress during a parade of Union Army veterans.

“…groups of children and their elders, too, gathered about him to gaze up into his face and ask him strange questions of how it felt to be a giant,” reported the Montpelier Examiner of Idaho, picking up a story from across the country.

I learned a good bit about Pat — a modest farmer and shingle maker by trade — in my work as a genealogist, as he hailed from the same southwestern Pennsylvania counties of Washington and Greene that my ancestors called home.

He was born in Washington County but lived much of his life in Greene. He served during the Civil War in the Company A, 22nd Pennsylvania Cavalry Regiment (Ringgold Battalion), apparently not seeing close conflict and being mustered out after the conflict ended. He’s buried beneath a simple marker in the veterans section of Washington Cemetery.

But by no means was he just a local hero. He was a newspaper darling, inspiring headlines nationwide for decades. No one knows for sure if he was, to a degree of scientific certainty, actually the tallest soldier in the Civil War. But the fact that he was assserted as such for decades, without contradiction, makes a compelling case.

Many of these accounts are preserved through the Library’s Chronicling America historical newspaper database, which, among other Library collections, enables modern researchers to peek into the life of this lofty cavalryman.

How tall was Big Pat exactly? It depends on who was doing the telling.

Most consistent are the medically detailed surgeon’s certificates that accompanied his postwar pension claims. These put him at the aforementioned 6 feet, 9 inches. His earlier enlistment and military records, though, put him at a mere 6 feet, 5 inches. (This may have been intentional, to get around Army medical regulations regarding height, or perhaps he just grew later. He was 20 when he enlisted.) The National Tribune in Washington, D.C, reported that he stood “exactly 7 feet.” The man himself listed that as his height in an ad seeking a spouse. Still, a widely reprinted news report of his death pegged him at 7 feet, 4 inches. Not to be outdone, The Day Book, a Chicago newspaper, authoritatively stated “He was over 8 feet in height.”

The one thing everyone agreed on was that his personality matched his size.

He liked to draw attention through his wardrobe, props and poses. A widely reprinted story about the Union Army parade in Pittsburgh in November 1894 noted (as in The National Tribune) that Bane “… is very slender, and always on dress occasions wears a high silk hat, which adds greatly to his elongated appearance.”

A longer version of the same story, reprinted in Wyoming in the Rawlins Republican, noted that as Pat led his veterans unit “… cheers greeted him everywhere. In fact, Pat received a genuine ovation, which he returned with a smile.” And: “His manners are affable, and in his nature there is a large vein of humor. He considers it quite a joke to stand beside as small a specimen of manhood as he can find and make him look as diminutive as possible.”

The Montpelier Examiner in Idaho later recounted his joy as he once was swarmed at a circus, and the Baltimore County Union remarked on his status as the tallest spectator at the inauguration of President Theodore Roosevelt, the fourth such event Bane traveled to witness.

One thing that eluded such a good-natured man, however, was a spouse. On Jan. 19, 1893, Bane advertised in the National Tribune for a wife. His request appeared alongside 11 others who “desire[d] correspondence with a view to matrimony.” Each of these hopefuls provided a name and address. The only one to include any particulars was Bane, whose line read, “William P. Bane, Nineveh, Pa., (lady must be six feet six inches in h[e]ight, no less).”

It did not get the results he wanted. Not only did he run a second ad on Nov. 9, 1893, but he also repeated his height stipulation and required a photograph. Most notably — perhaps revealing something about the responses he received to his first ad — he included a closing statement: “No foolishness.”

Entertained by these specifications, the New Dominion in Morgantown, West Virginia, chortled “Pat seems to have high notions.”

Though there are several allusions to Bane’s matrimonial aspirations in the media, as well as in his military pension correspondence and depositions, there is no evidence that he ever married.

He also had health issues. Late in life, he reported problems with bronchitis, first contracted while on picket duty during the Civil War. On March 17, 1898, a headline on the front page of the Freeland Tribune in Pennsylvania read, “Wants More Pension. Giant Pat, the Tallest Man in the Civil War. Alleges Disabilities Due to the Poor Fit of His Uniforms.”

The article diminished Pat’s military service as “not especially noteworthy” and questioned his eligibility for support, claiming his disabilities “do not prevent him from plying his trade of shinglemaker … or from traveling about the country as extensively as possible on the spending money paid him by Uncle Sam.” They summed him up as “a very tall and healthy man … whose only troubles appear to come from his tailor and his shoemaker.”

At the time, Pat was receiving a veteran’s pension of $12 per month. He tried to convince pension boards that should be upped to the maximum of $30, arguing that his disability was “contracted in the service,” but was not successful. It was later increased to $17, but this seemed more related to inflation than to any particular ailment.

On March 16, 1912, the ever-cheerful Pat Bane passed away in Washington County, Pennsylvania. He was 68. His death made news across the nation, as headlines from Connecticut’s  Bridgeport Evening Farmer to South Dakota’s the Lemmon Herald declared that the Union’s tallest soldier had led his last parade.

In the county where he would be laid to rest, his height remained his defining characteristic — even if no one ever knew quite what it was. A local newspaper, the Charleroi Mail, wrote that “the coffin in which Pat will be buried … with full military honors will be the largest ever ordered from Washington, measuring seven and one half feet.”

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