I have written articles talking about 7 feet tall people, 8 feet tall people, the tallest natural giants, the tallest twins, the tallest couples, the tallest toddlers, the tallest teenagers, the fattest people in history, the biggest babies in history, and everything else you could possibly think of. However that is one question that I have wanted to answer for the longest time…”Who was the largest/biggest person in history?”
Now that question is hard because now you have to consider more than one variable. When it comes to figure out who is bigger with height or weight, that is easy to do since it is one variable. To find the heaviest, you put a scale underneath them and note the number.With height, you put them next to a vertical measuring tape.
With looking for big, you have to take the two factors of height and weight together and weigh them out. In history, there has one who was just a lot “bigger” than the rest of people around. That would be Mills Darden of North Carolina.
There are no picture of this giant of a man and of the pictures on the internet, they are not of Darden himself but of someone else.
He was said to have been 7′ 6″ and weighed up to 1000 lbs. Now that is a very big man. From the Tallest Man website HERE, I paste the article on his life below…
Mills Darden – 7 feet 6 inches (228.6 cm)
| APPLETON’s CYCLOPAEDIA OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY ” N. Y., 1892, volume 2, page 77:DARDEN, Miles, giant, b. in North Carolina is 1798; d. in Henderson county, Tenn., 28 Jun, 1857. He wits seven feet six inches in height, and at his death weighed more than one thousand pounds. Until 1838 he was active, energetic, and able to labor, but from that time was obliged to remain at home, or be moved about in a wagon. In 1850 it required thirteen and is halt yards of cloth, one yard wide, to make him as coat. His coffin was eight feet long, thirty-five inches deep, thirty-two inches across the breast, eighteen across tie bead, and fourteen across the feet.”Mills Darden (October 7, 1799 – January 23, 1857) is alleged to have been one of the largest men in history. He was widely reported to have stood approximately 7 feet 6 inches (2.3 m) tall and is said to have weighed around 1,000 to 1,100 pounds (450 to 500 kg) at his heaviest. If the reported figures are correct, Darden was 30 percent taller and about six times as heavy as the average American male of today. Mills (or Miles) Darden was born on October 7, 1799, near Rich Square, North Carolina, to John and Mary Darden. He was married at least once and had several children. His wife Mary, who died in 1837 aged about 40, was 4 feet 11 inches (1.5 m) tall and weighed 98 pounds (44 kg), and the tallest of their sons reached 5 feet 11 inches (1.8 m) (tall for an era when the average adult American male only stood about 5 feet 6 inches (1.7 m)). Mills Darden made his living as a farmer and reportedly owned a saloon at some point. There are many tales of his enormous size and strength, although it is difficult to tell whether they are fact or fiction. A few cunning villagers once measured his weight by marking the exact point his one-horse cart (which had springs) lowered to as he sat on it. Later on, they placed large rocks on the cart to see just how much weight it would take to match Mills sitting on it. They concluded that he weighed over a thousand pounds. He died on January 23, 1857. He was buried in Lexington, Tennessee. His grave, and his wife’s, have been restored by the local Development Authority. No known photo remains of him. |
Me: When it comes to these types of stories of people who were from the 19th century or any time before that when the picture and photograph had not been invented yet, it is really hard for someone ilke me to completely take the story and dimensions of this guy seriously. People back then were much smaller (shorter) and for anyone who was probably over 6′ 6″ they would have looked tremendously tall and people might have thought they were much bigger than they really are. If this guy was alive today, I would have definitely have liked to get him checked on how big he really is. Does that mean that I don’t believe this guy was as tall and heavy as the people back then proclaimed? Yeah, I would guess that this guy was not the 7’6″ height he was claimed at, but probably more like 7’0″.
However, this is all just my own personal opinion. I still wanted to pay my respects to this person and don’t want to get into any argument of whether Mills Darden deserves the title of being called the “biggest man in history”. For this post, I really just want to state the information I found and let you interpret it how you would like.
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