1888

In eighth grade, my social-studies teacher at the American High School in Mexico City, the late and memorable Mrs. Draine (whose son eventually ran across this Web page accidentally through Google–the Internet is such a small world!), gave each of us a year to research in American history. Mine was 1888; interestingly, that’s when the American School Foundation, which operated my high school, was founded.

Ever since then, things that happened in 1888 have always caught my eye. Unfortunately, until a few years ago I hadn’t kept a list. I’ve resolved to change that, although I still notice more events than I record.

Turns out a huge number of cities and towns in southern California incorporated themselves in 1888, which must stem from some legal event. I’ve omitted most of those from my survey, and also individuals and events I know or care nothing about. I welcome additions to the list, especially from outside the US, preferably by email.

Events

• American Statistical Association founded
• Santa Fe railroad arrives in Fullerton CA; Santa Fe depot opens in Encinitas CA.
• National Aquarium relocated from Woods Hole MA to Washington DC
• Marine Biological Laboratory founded at Woods Hole MA
• Melville Weston Fuller becomes Chief Justice of the United States
• Mortmain and Charitable Uses acts regulates dead-hand transactions under British tax laws
• Brazil abolishes slavery, the last country in the Western world to do so
• Friedrich Wilhelm Nikolaus Karl king of Prussia and German emperor for 99 days
• Financial Times ( London) founded
• Katz’s Deli founded in NY
• Gustav Lindenthal proposes first design for Hudson river bridge, eventually completed in 1931 as George Washington Bridge
• Spires on St Patrick’s Cathedral (NY) built
• Eiffel Tower main construction (started 1887, finished 1889)
• Hinckley & Schmitt, water company in the Chicago area, founded
• Pinehurst Tea Plantation founded (3rd in US, and the only one still operating)
• First Ecumenical World Methodist Conference
• Emperor Meiji founds Order of the Paulownia Sun ( Japan)
• William II becomes German Kaiser and King of Prussia
• Ringling Brothers acquire their first circus elephant
• “In one (blizzard) which visited Dakota and the States of Montana, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas and Texas in January, 1888, the mercury fell within twenty-four hours from 74o above zero to 28o below it in some places, and in Dakota went down to 40o below zero.  In fine clear weather, with little or no warning, the sky darkened and the air was filled with snow, or ice-dust, as fine as flour, driven before a wind so furious and roaring that men’s voices were inaudible at a distance of six feet.  Men in the fields and children on their way from school died ere they could reach shelter; some of them having been not frozen, but suffocated from the impossibility of breathing the blizzard.  Some 235 persons lost their lives.  This was the worst storm since 1864; the Colorado River in Texas was frozen with ice a foot thick, for the first time in the memory of man.”
• Lewis family of Lambertville PA begins commercial shad fishing in the Delaware river
• Burnham & Root build The Rookery (later renovated by Frank Lloyd Wright, among others)
• Manischewitz (yes, that Manischewitz) founded
• Burlington Railroad strike
• Milwaukee Art Museum founded
• Gray’s Grist Mill celebrates its centennial in Rhode Island
• American School Foundation incorporated in Mexico City; operates my high-school alma mater, where Mrs. Draine got me started on all this
• Richard Felton Outcalt goes to work as an illustrator for Edison Labs. Within six years, he’s drawing The Yellow Kid for the Pulitzer’s New York World, having just added color; shortly Hearst’s New York Journal hires Outcalt away, whereupon the World hires a stand-in and a nasty battle of originator versus copycat ensues, giving rise to the term “yellow journalism”.
• 1180 F (480 C), Bennett, Colorado (state record)
• Bandai volcano ( Japan) erupts for 1st time in 1,000 years
• Benjamin Harrison (Senator, R-Indiana) beats President Grover Cleveland (D),
• California gets its 1st seismograph
• Congress creates the Department of Labor
• CPR opens Hotel Vancouver, Vancouver British Columbia
• Ferry in San Pablo Bay explodes
• French Panama Canal company fails
• Great blizzard of ’88 strikes northeast US, 2nd largest snowfall in New York NY history (21″)
• Jack the Ripper kills victims in London
• Louisville KY becomes 1st government in US to adopt Australian ballot
• Moshav Gederah is attacked by the Arabs
• National Geographic Society founded ( Washington DC)
• Pennsylvania’s Monongehela River rises 32′ after 24 hour rainfall
• “After the completion of the iron staircase in the monument’s interior, the Washington Monument was first accessible to the public in 1886, closed much of 1887 until it could be better protected from vandals, and reopened in 1888 with a public elevator.”
• Teetotalers excursion train crushed, killing 64 (Mud Run PA)
• 246 reported killed by hail in Moradabad, India
• Don Eloy Lecanda Chávez gives Herrero family a financial interest in Vega Sicilia vineyards and winery in the Ribera del Duero appellation, eventually leading to today’s ultra-scarce Único.
• Thomas P “Boston” Corbett, allegedly the soldier who shot John Wilkes Booth once he was cornered, and who had spent time in the Andersonville prison camp before being paroled back to service in the Union Army, and subsequently had trouble adjusting to life, especially without the fame he felt he deserved for shooting Booth, and who would later die in the great Hinckley fire in Minnesota, escapes from the Topeka asylum, where he’d been confined supposedly for insanity.
• Sara Breedlove, later to become Madam C.J. Walker of hair-product fame, leaves Delta, Louisiana, for St. Louis, Missouri.
• Jekyl Island Club opens (still with one “l”; had two before and after its role as gathering place for the hyper-elite).
• M. Larson inscribes his name on Pioneer Wall in Canyon Gorge, Capitol Reef National Park, Utah
• Sheldon Jackson, Commissioner of Education in the Alaska Territory, establishes policy that native Alaskan “Pupils are required to speak and write English exclusively,” since “instruction in their vernacular is not only of no use to them but is detrimental to their speedy education and civilization.”
• Universal Exposition, Barcelona
• Victorian Juvenile Industrial Exhibition, Centennial International Exhibition, Melbourne
• International Exhibition, Glasgow
• Grand Concours International des Sciences et de l’Industrie, Brussels
• Exposición Universal de Barcelona
• Exposiçao Industrial Portugueza
• Skokie IL incorporated. My 9th-grade American History teacher, Mr Lesperance, told us at least once a week that Skokie, where he’d grown up, was the largest town (as opposed to, say, city) in the United States. I could never figure out how to verify that.
• C.R. Ashbee founds Guild of Handicraft in London, several years before it moves to the Cotswolds.
• Milwaukee Art Museum founded.
• An article published in the Atlanta Constitution in 1888 claims that, towards the end of the war of 1812, an American went hunting and by accident crossed behind the British lines, where he shot a crow. He was caught by a British officer, who, complimenting him on his fine shooting, persuaded him to hand over his gun. This officer then leveled his gun and said that as a punishment the American must take a bite of the crow. The American obeyed, but when the British officer returned his gun he took his revenge by making him eat the rest of the bird. This is such an inventive novelization of the phrase’s etymology that it seems a shame to point out that the original expression is not recorded until the 1850s, and that its original form was to eat boiled crow, whereas the story makes no mention of boiling the bird.
• Magdalen College School builds St Swithun’s buildings across the river from Magdalen College.
• House of Glunz founded in Chicago
• Chicago Latin School founded
• Panama Lottery Bond
• All Thompson family salt businesses absorbed into the Salt Union
• Portland (OR) Rose Festival starts
• Friedrich Goltz performs the first recorded hemispherectomy (albeit on a dog; C Kenneally, The New Yorker  7/3/2006, p38: “apparently, the post-op animal exhibited the same personality and a minimal reduction in intelligence”)
• During a December blizzard, Richard Wetherill and his brother-in-law Charles Mason were patrolling for stray cows and happened upon what is today the most famous of the Ancestral Pueblo dwellings, Cliff Palace, at Mesa Verde National Park
• Mining begins at what will one day become the site of the Aspen Music Festival School
• National Livestock Bank building constructed following Burnham & Root design
• Goodman Steamship Dock active on Chicago River
• Illinois Supreme Court overturns Chicago’s first attempt to annex Hyde Park Township; soon, the Legislature will give Chicago the necessary authority
• Chicago Edison, the precursor to Samuel Insull’s Commonwealth Edison, opens its first station to provide electricity commercially to Chicago businesses
• Amos Alonso Stagg, who will eventually coach the University of Chicago’s national champion Monsters of the Midway football teams, graduates from, of all places, Yale
• Gandhi goes to University College London to train as a barrister
• The earliest celluloid film was shot by Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince using the Le Prince single-lens camera made in 1888. It was taken in the garden of the Whitley family house in Oakwood Grange Road, Roundhay, a suburb of Leeds, Yorkshire, Great Britain, possibly on October 14. Second oldest is his “Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge” of the same year.
• Santo Tomás winery founded in Ensenada, Baja California, the first in that region
• Frank Bowden creates Raleigh Bicycle Company, having taking up cycling after making a fortune in the stock market and then being given six months to live — incorrectly, as it turned out; later he would invent the Bowden Cable, which enabled levers on handlebars to operate brakes, and later enabled all kinds of other mechanical force transmission.
• South San Francisco Opera House opens.
• Banff Springs Hotel opens.
• The Rudd Concession of 1888, fraudulently obtained from King Lobengula, became the vehicle through which colonialists obtained mineral rights in Mashonaland. The concession provided Rhodes with the impetus to obtain a Royal Charter in 1889, which among other things, granted the BSAC authority to administer and govern the regiontha encompasses present day Zimbabwe. The Charter was granted notwithstanding King Lobengula’s protestations that he had been deceived. Lobengual repudiated the Rudd Concession stating that he would “not recognise the paper, as it contains neither my words nor the words of those who got it.” The response by Queen Victoria to King Lobengula’s protestation to this development was that it “would be unwise to exclude white men”.
• Frederick Douglass becomes the first African-American to win a vote in a major party’s presidential roll call vote. (He got one vote on the fourth ballot.)
• Massachusetts passes “An Act to Provide for Printing and Distributing Ballots”, thereby becoming the first US state to adopt Australian (ie, secret, government-provided) voting.
• First steps toward the Columbia Club in Indianapolis: “In 1888 a contingent of Indianapolis’ most distinguished residents united their efforts to help elect Benjamin Harrison as the nation’s 23rd president, and the only Hoosier to occupy the White House. This group, the Harrison Marching Society, welcomed all dignitaries and delegations visiting Indianapolis during the campaign… [and] was formally organized on February 13, 1889”
• American Mathematical Society founded
• R.G. Andre, a skilled saddlemaker and prominent businessman in Tempe, builds a Victorian-styled commercial building on Mill Avenue in and opens a saddlery and harness shop; now the Rúla Búla pub.
• Caffé Fiaschetteria Italiano founded in Montalcino,Tuscany, Italy.
• Fridjof Nansen completes the first traverse of Greenland on skis.
• Raskas Foods founded in St Louis; acquired in 2002 by Schreiber Foods, which thereby became the largest maker of private-label cream cheese in the US.
• Halloween Riot at Dickinson College: “[President] Himes told the students how he hated the old picket fence along the north end of campus, and had finally received enough money to replace it with a nicer iron one.  Therefore, when he would return on Monday, he hoped to see the old fence gone, no questions asked… The students did burn the fence around eleven o’clock that night, in a campus bonfire that resulted in a fight between the college, and the town firemen and other residents… The event became the talk of the town…”
• Maria Mitchell, said to be the first American woman astronomer, retires from Vassar,where she taught her students that “when [women] come to truth through their investigations… the truth which they get will be theirs, and their minds will work on and on unfettered”.
• Washington DC begins to replace horse and cable cars with electric streetcars; the first line chartered is the Eckington & Old Soldiers’ Home Railway.
• Marie Owens and her husband move from Ottawa to Chicago; a year later she joins the city health department as one of five female factory inspectors who enforce child labor and compulsory-education laws, and two years later she is transferred to the police department and given powers of arrest, the title of detective sergeant and a police star, and so becomes (so far as anyone has been able to discover) the first female police officer in the US.
• The US and China negotiate the Bayard-Zhang Treaty, which would prohibit Chinese immigration or the return of Chinese laborers to the U.S. for twenty years, unless the laborers have assets worth at least $1,000 or immediate family living in America, in return for which the United States government would agree to protect Chinese people and property in America. Finding the treaty insufficient, Congress unilaterally passes and Grover Cleveland signs the Scott Act, which permanently bans the immigration or return of Chinese laborers to the US. Mass demonstrations in California follow, and about 20,000 Chinese who had left the U.S. temporarily for China were refused reentry (including about 600 who were already traveling to America when the legislation was enacted). The Supreme Court upheld the Scott Act over Chinese objections.
• Sissiereta Jones, with a voice said to rival that of Italian diva Adelina Patti, makes her New York City debut in April, and tours thereafter, having been dubbed by an admiring critic as “the Black Patti”.
• Gristedes, a fine-foods purveyor, opens in New York City at 42nd Street and 2nd Avenue, where at least until 2012 it will hold the record for the longest uninterrupted direct-delivery service in North America.
• James Abbott McNeil Whistler marries Beatrice Godwin.
• Land for Veterans Administration center in west Los Angeles deeded to the US government.
• “By one anecdotal estimate, three out of ten average American men would sport a toothpick in their mouths in public”
• Bacardi is named official purveyor of rum to the royal house of Spain.
• Mine manager Wilhelm Castendyck founds the firm Gerolsteiner Sprudel as a GmbH in Gerolstein, drills its first well, and the resulting water becomes a sort of official water of the city, popular because of its high amount of natural carbonic acid.
• Capital Savings Bank founded in Washington DC, the first bank organized and operated by African Americans; “…Capital Savings helped stimulate Black entrepreneurship by offering loans to Black-owned businesses and land owners when white-owned banks would not. Confidence in the bank continued to grow, and, by 1892, deposits were estimated at $300,000”
• General Thomas Lincoln Casey, chief of the Army Corps of Engineers, placed in charge of constructing the the Jefferson Building, the LIbrary of Congress’s first dedicated building.
• The Rock Creek Railway, the second electric streetcar incorporated in the District of Columbia, was incorporated in 1888 and started operations in 1890 on 2 blocks of Florida Avenue east of Connecticut Avenue. 
• The Hotel del Coronado, in the city of Coronado across the bay from San Diego, debuted as an architectural masterpiece, acclaimed for its spectacular seaside setting and world-famous weather. Outfitted with electricity and every modern amenity, The Del was a destination resort before the term existed, attracting a wealthy clientele from the Midwest, East Coast, and Europe. These guests – who arrived with their own servants in tow – generally stayed for months at a time. (My parents spent their honeymoon at the Del.)
• HONOLULU Magazine starts publication; it “…covers restaurants, entertainment, news, real estate, schools and shopping in Hawai‘i​”
• Frederick Arthur Stanley, 16th Earl of Derby and before that Lord Stanley of Preston, becomes Governor General of Canada; while serving in that role, he donates the silver punch-bowl trophy eventually known as hockey’s Stanley Cup.
• Oceanside and Escondido CA incorporated.
• Oceanside’s first pier was built in 1888 at the foot of Couts Street, now known as Wisconsin Street, according to the Oceanside Historical Society.
• Texas Capitol building completed in Austin.
• Spreckels establishes the Western Beet Sugar Company in Watsonville CA, which was at that time the largest beet sugar factory in the U.S.
• Restaurant Boutary, Paris, maison fondé​e en 1988
• Tiffin University founded in in affiliation with Heidelberg College in Ohio; later split off and moved into town.
• A report by the California State Board of Education called attention to the fact that there was “…but one use of the semicolon” in its lessons, its function restricted to separating independent clauses that contained commas.
• University Heights neighborhood founded as part of a planned site for a San Diego branch of the University of Southern California. “The plan fell through, and the tract of land intended for the university was later used for the State Normal School (predecessor to San Diego State College). The headquarters of San Diego Unified School District currently occupies the site, near the corner of El Cajon and Park boulevards.”
• Cincinnati contest pits Louis Traub against Frank McGurrin to see who can write fastest on a typewriter. Possibly the contest is between a QWERTY keyboard and a competing design, or possibly between a touch typist and a hunt-and-peck typist.
• Don Ignacio Vivanco establishes the coffee-growing Hacienda Las Animas in Veracruz; in 1913 it will be bought by Antonio Ruiz Galindo, who modernizes its farming and roasting methods and so lays foundation for what today is the rainforest-certified 1888 Coffee Company, exporting mostly to Europe but also with outposts in San Francisco and Oakland.
• Roman Jewish ghetto walls are torn down, and the ghetto is almost completely demolished. The Roman ghetto was the last remaining one in western Europe until the Nazis reintroduced them in the 1930s.
• On June 9, Grant County, Kansas, was the last county in the state to be created. It was named for Ulysses S. Grant and the county seat is Ulysses.
• Seven midwestern milling companies merge to create the American Cereal Co. In 1901, it changed its name to the Quaker Oats Co., using a trademark owned by one of the partners in the merger.
• Spiegel’s issued its first catalog in 1888 to draw customers into its furniture store in Chicago’s downtown. It created its mail-order business in 1904
• The Southern Pacific Railroad establishes a new coaling station, labeled “A”, to refuel the steam locomotives then used in the San Joaquin valley. “Coaling Station A” eventually was shortened to “Coalinga”; today the town is largely agricultural, and at the center of Chevron’s Coalinga Oil Field.

Invention

• William Bundy patents the timecard clock
• Theophilus Van Kannel of Philadelphia patents revolving door
• Hertz succeeds in generating electromagnetic waves at radio and microwave frequencies and measuring their properties
• Stanley  Header, the first coal-loading machine used in the United States, developed in England and tested in Colorado
• Gregg shorthand first published in pamphlet form
• Emile Christian Anderson perfects method for growing pure yeast strains, enabling more consistent beermaking.
• 1st ballpoint pen patented
• 1st wax drinking straw patented, by Marvin C Stone in Washington DC
• George Eastman patents “Kodak box camera”, patents 1st roll-film camera, registers “Kodak”
• Leroy Buffington patents a system to build skyscraper
• Karl Benz begins to sell the “Benz Patent Motorwagen”, making it the first commercially available automobile in history
• Dr James Henry Salisbury, in his book, “The Relation of Alimentation and Disease,” famously recommends that sick patients eat broiled ground beef at every meal (for health reasons), specifically the now-eponymous “Salisbury Steak”

Sports & Competition

• USC Trojans (then Methodists) play their 1st football game
• St Andrews Golf Club, Yonkers NY, opens with just 6 holes
• NY Giant pitcher Tim Keefe sets a 19 game win streak record
• NY Giant pitcher Rube Marquard ties record of 19 game win-streak
• Lord Walsingham kills 1,070 grouse in a single day
• Heavyweight Boxing champion John L Sullivan draws Charlie Mitchell in 30
• Crouching start first used by Charles Sherrill of Yale
• Princeton has best college football team, by Chi Square Linear Win-Difference Ratio
• 14th Kentucky Derby: George Covington aboard MacBeth II wins in 2:38
• 16th Preakness: F Littlefield, aboard Refund, wins in 2:49
• 1st indoor baseball game played at fairgrounds in Philadelphia
• 1st organized rodeo competition held, Prescott, Arizona
• 1st beauty contest ( Spa, Belgium), 18 yr old West Indian wins
• Ernest Renshaw wins Wimbledon

Art, Music, Literature

• First performance of Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony
• William Merritt Chase, Boat House, Prospect Park
• Vincent d’Indy’s Wallenstein-trilogy premieres
• Sherlock Holmes detecting, according to Conan Doyle, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, “The Valley of Fear”, “The Sign of Four”, & “A Scandal in Bohemia”
• “Casey at the Bat” recited by DeWolf Hopper, then published (SF Examiner)
• Claude Monet, Poplars at Giverny, Sunrise (oil on canvas)
• Samuel Butler, Narcissus (a comic cantata in the style of Handel)
• Gaugin & van Gogh working together in Arles: “In general, Vincent and I do not see eye to eye, especially as regards painting…” (Gaugin)
• Paul Gaugin, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Vincent van Gogh (Les Misérables)
• Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gaugin
• Paul Gauguin, The Vision After the Sermon
• August Strindberg, Miss Julie
• Sarah Bernhardt performs as Tosca
• In the summer of 1888, Delius moved to Paris, where he came to know Fauré and Ravel, artists Gaugin and Munch, and the Scandinavian writer Strindberg; became intoxicated with grand opera; met his future wife, Helene “Jelka” Rosen, a German painter; and contracted the syphilis that would later shut down his career and eventually take his life.
• Charles Courtney Curran paints Lotus Lilies on Lake Erie, and then moves to Paris.
• Oscar Wilde publishes “The Happy Prince and Other Tales”, at only which point, according to Alex Ross, “…did his literary output catch up to his fame” (The New Yorker, August 8, 2011, p 66)
• John Singer Sargent paints portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner that now hangs in the museum in what was her home.
• Richard Strauss, Don Juan (after Nicolaus Lenau), Op. 20.
• Concertgebouw (now Royal Concertgebouw), widely recognized as one of the world’s great concert halls, opens in Amsterdam in April; the eponymous orchestra gives its first concert in November.
• Henri Charles Guérard (French, 1846-1897) paints The Assault of the Shoe. This grew out of a painting by his wife, Eva Gonzalès, a French Impressionist painter who was Eduard Manet’s only student. Gonzalès’swork included several paintings of shoes.
• Frank Holl (British, 1845–1888), Portrait of Pierpont Morgan
• Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade
• Miss Daisy’s first trip to Mobile, for her brother Walter’s wedding
• Conan Doyle (anonymously), “John Huxford’s Hiatus”, The Cornhill Magazine

Births

• Adolf Hitler, Charlie Chaplin, and Ludwig Wittgenstein probably conceived
• Clinton Golden, Pennsylvania, founder of United Steelworkers of America
• Dale Carnegie, author (How to Win Friends & Influence People)
• Ernst Heinrich Heinkel, German inventor (1st rocket-powered aircraft)
• Eugene O’Neill, NYC, dramatist (Desire Under the Elms-Nobel 1936)
• Giorgio De Chirico, Greece, Metaphysical painter (Soothsayer)
• Hans-Thilo Schmidt, spy who disclosed key secrets of military Enigma machine to Poles
• Harpo Marx [Adolph], NYC, actor/comedian (Marx brothers)
• Hedwig “Vicki” Baum, Austria/US, author (Men Never Know)
• Irving Berlin [Isadore Balin], Temum, Siberia, composer (White Christmas)
• James E Casey, founder of United Parcel Service
• Jim [James Francis] Thorpe, Shawnee OK, decathlete (Olympics-gold-1912)
• John Foster Dulles, US Secretary of State (1953-59)
• Josef Albers, German/US graphic artist/painter/writer (Bauhaus)
• Joseph P Kennedy, financier/diplomat, father of JFK, RFK & Teddy
• Knute Rockne, Norwegian/US, football player/coach (Notre Dame)
• Matthew Heywood Campbell Broun, 1st President of American Newspaper Guild
• Maurice Chevalier, Paris, thanked heaven for little girls (Gigi)
• Otto Stern, German/US physicist (Stern-Gerlach-experiment, Nobel 1943)
• Raymond Chandler, Chicago, mystery writer (The Long Goodbye)
• Richard E Byrd, Virginia, admiral/polar explorer (1926)
• Robert Moses, power broker (built Long Island & NYC parks & roads)
• Sir Chandrasekhara, Raman India, physicist (Nobel 1930)
• Sol Hurok, theatrical impresario
• T.E. Lawrence, Tremadoc, Wales, soldier/writer (aka Lawrence of Arabia)
• T.S. Eliot, St Louis, poet/dramatist/critic (The Waste Land-Nobel 1948)
• Tarzan of the Apes, according to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novel
• James Alexander (mathematician, knot theory, etc)
• Ronald Knox, eminent British Catholic theologian, and eventual codifier, on behalf of the Detection Club, of the “Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction” later systematically ignored by Agatha Christie.
• Paul Popenoe, who became an ardent advocate of eugenics after studying with David Starr Jordan at Stanford, and then, after his ardor translated into admiration for Adolf Hitler and publicity about that starting in 1934 by 1949 made his positions on mandatory sterilization and the supremacy of the “Nordic” race unpopular, regrouped, refocused his efforts, and began writing the column “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” in the Ladies’ Home Journal based on what he’d earlier advocated in his eugenics-oriented American Institute of Family Relations, and through that and other writing helped support Dan Quayle and the Defense of Marriage Act.
• Alex Osborn, the founding O in the influential ad agency BBDO and the putative father of brainstorming.

Deaths

• Woodrow Wilson’s mother
• Charles Crocker, principal manager of Central Pacific construction for the Robber Barons; his fortune underlay Crocker Bank
• Syzgmunt von Wróblewski, one of the first to liquefy oxygen
• Carl Zeiss
• Asa Gray, US, botanist (Flora of North America), dies at 77
• Louisa May Alcott, US, author (Old-fashioned Girl), dies at 55
• Mary Ann Nicholls, a 42-year-old prostitute, stabbed to death, first victim of Jack the Ripper
• Long John Wentworth, Mayor of Chicago 1856-58 and 1860-61, memorialized by 70-foot obelisk in Rosehill Cemetery, the loftiest tombstone in the West
• Celia Ann Blaylock, known as “Mattie Earp” when she lived with Wyatt Earp in Tombstone, which was before he met Josie Marcus, with whom he lived until he died in 1929 in, of all places, Los Angeles.
• Domingo F Sarmiento, once President of Argentina: “Ocupó los cargos desde maestro de escuela hasta Presidente de la Republica y murió pobre” (from a plaque on his tomb)
• (Not exactly a death) The body of Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was exhumed from its grave in France, and returned to Spain — but without its head, which has never been recovered
• Moses Cohen Mordecai, an eminent Jewish citizen of Charleston, South Carolina who lived at 69 Meeting Street and “…operated a steamship line, served as state senator and sat on countless boards and commissions. His flagship, The Isabel, removed Major Robert Anderson and his men from Fort Sumter as the Civil War began”
• Edward Lear, poet, artist, author of “The Owl and the Pussycat”
• Nathaniel Currier (of Currier & Ives)

And one last hard-to-classify item…

…for which I’m indebted to D. Swain: “People usually wish that their friends shall have a happy new year, and sometimes “prosperous” is added to “happy.” lt is not likely that much happiness or prosperity can come to those who are living for the truth under such a dark number as 1888; but still the year is heralded by the glorious star Venus-Lucifer, shining so resplendently that it has been mistaken for that still rarer visitor, the star of Bethlehem.”
( H. P. BLAVATSKY, a.k.a., Madame Blavatsky, prophetess of Theosophy, Lucifer, Jan 1888)