Valentine Tapley is a Loyal Democrat in the United States who vowed that if the Republican Abraham Lincoln were elected president, he would never shave again.
He kept his promise, and then some. By the time Tapley died, at 80 years old in 1910, his beard was over 12 feet long! Talk about going to great lengths to stage a political protest.
In truth, the man with the prodigious beard had already begun his project well before the 1860 elections. Born in 1830, the oldest son of four children, Tapley reported that he sprouted his first facial hairs when he was 13. He never shaved.
By the time he was 20, Tapley had a beard that was so long he had to braid it and tuck it inside his shirt when he worked on the farm. As the beard lengthened, Tapley wrapped it around his body beneath his clothes. Eventually, he would roll up his beard, stuff it inside a silk pouch, and lay the package inside his clothes.
By the time of Lincoln’s election in 1860, Tapley’s beard was already six feet long, so his vow to never shave was hardly a hardship. When Tapley’s beard reached eight feet, it was claimed to be the longest in the world. Tapley was offered a handsome sum of $5,000 (or more than $125,000 in today’s dollars) to partake in an exhibit in a London Museum., which He declined.
Local children asked Tapley if they could use his beard for the annual May Pole dance, according to the Hannibal (Missouri) Courier-Post. He declined that request as well.
Tapley was proud of his unusual facial locks. “He dislikes any questions whether they are the longest in the world,” the Newport News reported in 1904. The News described Tapley, at the time 74, as “hale and hearty and lives an active life on the farm.” It also reported that in consideration of his beard, “he will not burn brush or work around a fire.”
Remarkably, Tapley wasn’t the only man in his neighborhood to go to such astonishing lengths with his facial hair. A local judge who’d moved to the area after partaking in the 1849 California Gold Rush, Elijah Gates, had himself grown a seven-foot-long beard. The New York Times interviewed a Missouri congressman about the dueling beardsmen.
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