When Big Louie Moilanen walked into a room in the Copper Country, he had to duck. The man stood somewhere close to eight feet tall, and for a stretch of his life he was billed as the tallest man in the world. He was also, through and through, a Yooper.
His full name was Lauri Moilanen, and his story starts in Finland, where he was born in 1886. When he was four, his family sailed for America and homesteaded just north of Hancock, in a little Finnish farming settlement that has since faded into a ghost town. His parents were ordinary-sized people. Louie was anything but.
By the time he was nine, he was already as tall as a grown man. By 18, he was reportedly over eight feet. He grew so tall that he built himself a special granary on the family farm just so he could walk inside without cracking his head on the beams.
Now, about that height. Accounts vary, and it was never officially verified, which is worth being upfront about. Different sources put him anywhere from about 7 foot 9 to a towering 8 foot 4. The black granite monument his hometown later built in his honor stands exactly 8 feet 3 inches, the same as the inner length of his casket. Whatever the precise number, he was almost certainly one of the tallest human beings alive at the time, and he still holds the record as the tallest man in Michigan history.
Everything about him was outsized. He wore size 19 shoes. His Stetson hats were size 9. No store could fit him, so a men’s shop over in Houghton tailored his clothes and special-ordered everything. His ring, the story goes, was big enough to slip a half-dollar through.
Word of the giant Finn spread, and for a while Louie took his height on the road, touring with a traveling circus as the world’s tallest man. But he never much cared for it. He did not enjoy being gawked at, stared at and whispered about by strangers, and before long he came home to the U.P. for good.
Back home, he lived a regular Yooper life, just on a bigger scale. He worked the copper mines like so many of his neighbors. He served as a justice of the peace. And he ran a saloon in Hancock, where folks swore he was the best bartender in town for one simple reason. He could reach every bottle on the shelf without ever getting up off his stool.
By every account, he was a gentle man, hardworking and kind, far more interested in his farm and his town than in being a spectacle. He came from the same Finnish stock that built the Copper Country, the same deep roots you can still feel everywhere in the U.P., right down to its sauna culture.
Sadly, the condition that made Louie a giant also wore his body down. In 1913, he fell gravely ill and died of tubercular meningitis. He was just 27 years old. They buried him in a nine-foot coffin in a cemetery west of Hancock.
For a while, the Copper Country giant was nearly forgotten. But a hundred years after his death, his neighbors made sure he would not be. In 2013, the Houghton County Historical Society and the Finnish American Heritage Center raised that 8-foot-3 monument in Hancock, a stone marker the exact height of the man himself. It even doubles as a measuring stick. Stand next to it, and you will see just how impossibly tall Big Louie really was.
He is a folk hero now, on both sides of the ocean, honored here in the Copper Country and back in his little Finnish hometown too.
A gentle giant from a U.P. farm who once stood taller than almost anyone on earth. That is about as Yooper a legend as they come.
Sources: the City of Hancock; the Houghton County Historical Society and the Finnish American Heritage Center; Roadside America; and Michigan in Pictures.
Featured image credit: Original photo by Frank Wendt, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Image lightly restored/enhanced for clarity.
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