The five Dionne sisters — Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie — were born on 28 May 1934 to a Franco-Ontarian farm family in nearby Corbeil. They were the first quintuplets in recorded history to survive infancy, and the Ontario government swiftly removed them from their parents to be raised under medical supervision in a purpose-built nursery across the road. For nine years they were paraded daily before paying tourists.
The original farmhouse where they were born was moved to North Bay in the mid-1980s to serve as a museum. Inside are the original furniture, photographs, the incubators in which the girls spent their first weeks, and the surviving sisters' own correspondence — a clear-eyed account of a strange and exploitative chapter of twentieth-century Canada. Small, informal, and quietly moving.