There was an old woman who lived west of the Soo. She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do.
Actually, she did know what to do, and it included having the children sleep in shifts, take turns wearing boots in the winter, and sharing overalls and dresses.
This is the amazing tale of Yooper legend Louise Cunningham, the iron woman from Iron Mountain, who gave birth to 21 children in the early 1900s and did it without cheating. There were no twins or triplets in the brood—just 21 single births starting in 1908 with a boy named Gilbert and ending in 1932 with a boy named Claude.
In the 24 years in between, there were 19 other children, which means that Louise was having almost one baby a year for more than two decades. She had 13 boys and eight girls. No Michigan woman in recorded history has ever given birth to more children.
“My grandmother Ramona was the youngest girl in the family,” said Chevon Kothari, Louise’s great-granddaughter, who lives in California. “My grandma would tell us stories all the time. They were very poor, and they lived in a small three-bedroom house. All the girls slept in one bedroom and all the boys slept in another. My grandma said there was always a lot of love in the house. The older kids helped raise the younger ones.”
If you’re wondering where Louise ranks among the most prolific mothers of all time, she’s at the very top—at least in modern times. There was a Russian woman in the 1700s, named Valentina Vassileyev, who supposedly gave birth to 69 children (a number that included numerous sets of twins, triplets, and quadruplets), but that tale is impossible to verify because records at the time were not well kept.
Since 1900 in the United States, when records can be verified, Louise ranks in the top six, just behind a Rhode Island woman who gave birth to 23 children, and four moms who had 22 kids each.
And the tales of how Louise and her husband Albert were able to raise 21 children in a small town in the western Upper Peninsula are absolutely epic.
“There were some stories that apparently a couple of the children died in childbirth or at a very young age, but according to what my grandma said, they all survived,” Kothari said. “I’m not sure what the truth is, but she did say that almost all of them lived at home when she was a child. There were at least 17 or 18 kids there at one time.”
The story begins in 1905, when 25-year-old Albert Cunningham of Menominee married a 14-year-old Canadian girl named Louise Prue. They settled in Menominee, moved across the river to Marinette, Wisconsin, for a couple years, and eventually found their way to Iron Mountain and its sister city, Kingsford. For the next several decades, they lived at various rental houses in both cities, none of which had more than three or four rooms total.
Louise had her first child, Gilbert, at age 17 and just kept going.
By the time she was up to child number 16, the newspapers picked up on the story of the ultra-prolific Iron Mountain mom, and every time Louise had another child, they’d run another story.
Iron Mountain is most famous these days as the hometown of Michigan State basketball coach Tom Izzo and his boyhood best friend, former Detroit Lions coach Steve Mariucci, but a century ago, it was best known as the home of the Cunningham Kids. They were true celebrities.
The Grand Rapids Press did a story on Louise and Albert in 1929, when they had 16 children all living at home, and it spelled out in detail what their daily life was like.
“One would think the problem of clothes, shoes and stockings would be a hard one in such a large family,” the story said. “But the younger children wear no shoes or stockings in summer, and one dress does service for three girls in one day. A pair of overalls does the same for three boys.”
Albert and two of the older boys worked at a fox farm in Menominee County, and they brought home barely enough to feed and clothe the family.
“Those who go to school wear shoes and stockings,” Louise said. “When they come home, they turn over their footwear to the ones who stayed in waiting for them. Then the latter go out for their turn in the snow. There isn’t any complaint. They all know about the arrangement, and they never are discontented.”
Louise also told the reporter than when they had to choose between enough to eat and enough to wear, they chose food.
“I think I would rather see the children threadbare than hungry,” she said. “There is always plenty to eat, and they can have it whenever they want it.”
As for sleeping arrangements, even though all the girls were in one room and all the boys were in another, they still didn’t have enough beds. The solution? Take shifts.
“They live in their $7-a-month house without difficulty by sleeping in groups, thus keeping the beds almost continually occupied,” another story said.
As for Chevon Kothari’s grandmother Ramona, the baby girl of the family, things for her started to go sour in 1944 when Louise passed away at age 54.
“My grandma had great fondness for her mother, but when her mother died, things really changed in the family,” Kothari said. “She was now living in a house with a dad and some older brothers who were basically alcoholics, and she couldn’t take it, so she went to Chicago to live with some other relatives. My grandma always referred to it as the time she ‘ran away from home.’”
Just like her own mom, Ramona married an older man and became a mother as a teenager.
“She met my grandpa in Chicago, and he was about 15 years older than her and had just gotten out of the military,” Kothari said. “They got married and my grandma had a baby herself when she was only 15, so she was always like a younger grandma to me.”
Ramona passed away in 2015 at age 84, the last survivor of the 21 Cunningham children.
“She only kept in touch with a couple of her siblings,” Kothari said. “She had a brother named Pete who was a couple years older than her, and he’s really the only one she saw on a regular basis.”
Probably the last time the Cunningham children were all together was in 1960, when Albert passed away in Iron Mountain at age 79. Ramona and her seven sisters posed for a somber photo in front of their father’s casket.
There are no doubt dozens if not hundreds of Cunnigham descendants scattered across the country, but Kothari hasn’t met any of them (aside from Ramona’s other grandchildren).
“I’ve never been to Iron Mountain, but I’d love to go,” she said. “I’d love to see where my grandma and her family grew up. My dad was living in Chicago for many years, but he lives in Michigan now. I’m going to be there next month. Maybe I’ll make the trip up to Iron Mountain.”
If she does, she’ll see that the sign welcoming people into town notes that Iron Mountain is the “Proud Hometown of Tom Izzo & Steve Mariucci.”
They need to put Louise Cunningham’s name on there, too, don’t you think? Tom Izzo won an NCAA championship, sure, but giving birth to 21 children? That’s in a league of its own.
Buddy Moorehouse teaches documentary filmmaking at Hillsdale College.
