Annette Dionne, who was part of one of the world's most famous set of siblings—a life they described resentfully as being "at the center of a circus"—has died. She was the last surviving Dionne quintuplet, the New York Times reports. Annette Dionne was 91 and died Wednesday in a hospital in Beloeil, Quebec, of complications from Alzheimer's disease, a family spokesman said. The sisters became a global sensation at their birth during the Great Depression. As children, they were put on display for paying visitors in a Canadian playground, called Quintland, where people watched them through wire mesh or one-way glass. Their parents sold hot dogs to the spectators. "It was exploitation," Annette Dionne said decades later. "We were not animals."
Born in rural Ontario in 1934, Annette and her sisters—Emilie, Marie, Yvonne, and Cecile—were the first known quintuplets to survive infancy. The five premature babies, with a combined birth weight of 13 pounds, 6 ounces, were kept alive in a farmhouse without electricity or modern plumbing, initially fed water and corn syrup until breast milk was donated. Their survival set off a wave of publicity that turned their birthplace near North Bay, Ontario, into a tourist draw that officials later said rivaled Niagara Falls in revenue. Life magazine once reported that Annette was the first of the girls to crawl, the first to cut a tooth, and the first to recognize her name.
The provincial government removed the quintuplets from their parents, saying it aimed to protect them from exploitation, and placed them in the specially built Quintland. The girls were cared for by Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe, the country doctor who delivered three of them and became a national figure, and by nurses rather than their parents. The children's images were used to promote products including toothpaste and breakfast cereal, and they met Hollywood stars and visiting royalty. They were taken in 1935 to be displayed at the World's Fair in Chicago, per People. Custody was returned to their parents in 1943 after Dafoe's death, but the move into a large government-provided house was strained, the sisters later said, and several accused their father of sexual abuse, per the Times.
All five left home at 18 for Montreal. Emilie died in 1954 after a seizure at a convent, Marie in 1970 after struggles with depression, Yvonne in 2001, and Cecile earlier this year, per the Times. Annette married, had children, divorced, and ran a flower shop. In 1998, Annette, Cécile, and Yvonne reached a multimillion-dollar settlement with the government of Ontario over their treatment as children. Late in life, Annette supported efforts to preserve their birth home as a museum, calling it a warning against repeating what had happened to the Dionne quintuplets. To people mired in "the grim reality" of the Depression, historian Pierre Berton wrote, the sisters provided a joyful escape. The view on the other side of the glass was different. "It's tiring," Annette said as an adult, "always being watched."
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