The Ontario government took five identical baby girls from their family and put them on display for tourists — surpassing Niagara Falls as the province's top attraction. Three million people came to watch children play.
On May 28, 1934, Elzire Dionne gave birth to five identical girls on a farm near Callander, Ontario — the first known identical quintuplets ever to survive infancy. They were premature and weighed a combined 13 pounds. The family was poor, French-Canadian, and already had six children.
Within four months, the Ontario government had taken custody of the girls. Premier Mitchell Hepburn pushed through legislation making them wards of the Crown until age 18, framed as protection. In practice, it handed control of five infants to the province and to Dr. Allan Dafoe, the physician who delivered them.
The province built a purpose-made compound called the 'Dafoe Hospital and Nursery' across the road from the girls' family home. Tourists viewed the children through one-way screens — the girls could not see the visitors watching them — during scheduled observation periods. Between 1936 and 1943, approximately three million people visited, making it Ontario's biggest tourist attraction, ahead of Niagara Falls.
Their likenesses were licensed to sell corn syrup, soap, milk, candy, and dolls. They starred in three Hollywood films. Newsreels showed them constantly. Their trust fund grew to $250,000 by their second birthday — then expenses mysteriously consumed much of it.
The family was finally reunited in 1943, when the girls were nine. The parents had used the trust fund to build a 20-room mansion next door to the nursery. The reunion was traumatic. The quintuplets felt like strangers in their own family, struggled to learn French again, and later disclosed that their father had sexually abused them.
In 1997, the three surviving sisters wrote an open letter to the parents of the newborn McCaughey septuplets, warning them against media exploitation. Ontario eventually reached a $4 million settlement with the sisters for the decades of commercial use of their childhoods. The last surviving quintuplet, Annette, died in December 2025 at age 91.