Smithsonian posted a comprehensive article about the Dionne Quintuplets, who we posted about recently. A single line in the article caught my eye, because I'd never heard of the Lyon quintuplets, who were born in Mayfield, Kentucky, in 1896, and were the first quintuplets in America to be born alive.
Elizabeth Lyon and her husband Oscar already had six children, and added five boys on April 29, 1896. They were delivered in one hour with a single placenta, meaning they were identical. They weighed between three and 4.25 pounds and were named Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul. The news got out, and the Lyon's small farmhouse was inundated with people wanting to see the babies. The sheriff had to call in deputies to control the crowds. John, the smallest baby, died just five days later, and all of the boys were dead in two weeks. Elizabeth blamed the crowds for the infants' deaths, but later in life admitted they starved to death. She had one wet nurse to help, and shipments of milk were offered, but Elizabeth said "they" wouldn't let her bottle-feed the babies.
But that wasn't the end of the story. The family buried the first baby, but exhumed him in fear of grave robbers. The five emaciated cadavers were embalmed and displayed locally for a couple of years, after which Elizabeth looked for a safe place to keep them. Read the saga of the Lyon quintuplets gleaned from contemporary newspaper accounts at the Trigg Cunningham family website.
See also: The Bushnell sextuplets.