1869

Pastor Hiram Wheeler, conducting services in the third church building, which, like the second one, was known as the "Church on the Rocks," because it sat on a rocky ledge overlooking the Sawkill (about ¾ mile east of our present location--that is, north of present-day Route 212, across from the country club).

Above is a map of the Woodstock village, published just a few years later, showing the Church on the Rocks on the east side of town, just north of current Route 212 (known then as simply Saugerties Road) and north of the Sawkill. It is identified simply as "LUTH. CH." (To enlarge the view, click it.)

Possibly in this year (1869), the bell cracked and became unusable.

According to historian Mark Anderson, there was probably little to distinguish our services from the typical services of other Protestant sects in America. The basic pattern was: scripture reading, hymn, prayer, Gospel reading, hymn, prayer, sermon, prayer, hymn, and benediction. Four times each year there would be a communion service; the service the week before would be a service of preparation for the communion.

According to a later reminiscence(1),

lived in rented rooms wherever they could be procured, sometimes several miles away.

This year saw the consecration of the new church for the second congregation, formed from families living in the eastern portion of the congregational "territory" (that is, the hamlet of Pine Grove, east of Centerville and north of present-day Route 212, where Old Route 212, Band Camp Road, and Pine Grove School Road come together in the Township of Saugerties. The map on the left was published a few years later and shows the location of the church, again labeled simply as "LUTH. CH." Below is the picture of the church building itself. (To enlarge either the map or the picture, just click it.)

The following is from the minutes of the Hartwick Synod(2):

Rev. H. Wheeler: Myself, Rev'ds Emerick and J.D. Wert, assisted by clerical brethren of other denominations, consecrated our new church at Pine Grove to the service of God on the 13th of January. It is a neat little church, well finished and furnished, and reflects much credit on the few faithful ones who have erected it. There is quite a debt remaining in our church, which will prevent the congregation from contributing much, for the present, toward the support of a pastor in the Woodstock pastorate, with which it is united. We organized a church in the new edifice in June last of 25 members, most of whom were members of our church at Woodstock. The growth of this church will necessarily be slow, for the want of material, but the two churches will evidently constitute a self-sustaining charge after a year or two. The attendance is very respectable in both churches. My people manifested their wonted kindness toward their pastor and family, for which they have our sincere thanks.

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Regional historian Alf Evers cited the reminiscences of Byron "Bide" Snyder, whose father had a store in town, about local Woodstock life at this time(3):

Spooks and witches were very prevalent when I was a boy. I never saw any myself, but many a time I have listened open mouthed to the blood curdling yarns of a certain old fellow who had personal encounters with dozens of them. At least he said so and we boys implicitly believed him. He had a deep scar on his shoulder that he said had been inflicted by an ugly old witch who had changed herself into a wild cat and jumped on him as he was on his way home. Of course we believed it, for there was the scar to prove it. The only way you could shoot a witch was by shooting the animal she had turned herself into with a silver bullet. He said he had almost enough silver to make one, and if he had only three silver dimes more, he could melt it up and make a bullet and feel safe. We saved up our pennies until we had thirty cents [$4.23 in 2006 dollars] which we exchanged for three dimes and gave them to him. I never heard if he killed the witch or not, but several hours after we left he was pretty well stewed. Thirty cents would do it in those days.

William Brinkerhoff tore down his ramshackle tavern in Woodstock.

David Short killed Ira Purdy at the home of W. Brower during a "stone bee," for clearing fields and building stone walls. Both men had become irritable from drinking too much rum.

Prospectors were exploring the Woodstock area for coal, oil, and gas.

Construction continued on the new Rondout & Oswego Railroad (the R&O), intended to extend from Kingston by way of the Esopus Valley and Pine Hill toward an ultimate objective of Lake Ontario. The route dared the sometimes-flooding Esopus Creek and was working its way up the steep Pine Hill in a series of exciting curves. The railroad was not officially open yet, but it began carrying freight. The first train carried dry hides to an Esopus Valley tannery on its outward trip and returned with a cargo of Delaware County butter.

The piratical-minded, foghorn-voiced Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt, 75, consolidated his Hudson River Railroad and his New York Central Railroad, thereby gaining a monopoly in rail transport between New York and Buffalo.

Isaac N. Secor of New York City and New Rochelle proposed building a hotel atop Woodstock's Overlook Mountain, a hotel he promised would outshine the Catskill Mountain House near Kaaterskill Clove, because of its higher elevation and its more breathtaking views. Unfortunately, he died before he could get started realizing his dream.

The Prospect Park Hotel was built in the village of Catskill right on the shore of the Hudson.

There were a large number of huge woodworking factories in the Catskills, turning out tremendous volume. Some of them were "stock factories," making parts wholesale; others made wooden bowls, wooden legs, rolling pins, policemen's billy clubs, little wooden pharmacy boxes, and porch pillars and balusters. These factories were shipping large orders of hardwood products to Europe, the West Indies, Central America, and South America.

The export trade in cane-seated chairs and in rocking cradles was very important. The furniture factory of Lemuel Chichester (son of Hunter furniture baron Samuel Chichester) in the factory town named for him produced up to 3,600 chairs and 900 rocking cradles per week. Hiram Whitney was also manufacturing chairs on a large scale in the Shandaken Valley.

Some operations were small, however: The Vosburgh brothers in Woodstock ran a small handicraft "turning mill" and would make anything to order.

Former New Paltz and Hurley slave Isabella Bomefree Van Wagenen, now an abolitionist itinerant preacher residing in Michigan and known as Sojourner Truth, 72, pictured here, addressed white audiences in Northern states on religion, on Negro and women's rights, and on temperance.

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Andrew Johnson, 61 (nominally a Republican), was President, succeeded during this year by Ulysses S. Grant, 47 (Republican). The newly elected 41st Congress was in session. A dollar in that year would be worth $14.11 in 2006 for most consumable products.

Serious epidemics of yellow fever, smallpox, typhus, and cholera killed thousands in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Memphis, and New Orleans.

Reconstruction and reaction

The amendment met spirited opposition even in the North. Here is liberal Republican Charles Francis Adams, 33(4):

Universal suffrage can only mean in plain English the government of ignorance and vice--it means a European, and especially Celtic, proletariat [working class] on the Atlantic coast, an African proletariat on the shores of the Gulf, and a Chinese proletariat on the Pacific.

Many of the newly freed blacks moved from the plantations to work in cities and towns, where they were protected and where they enjoyed mutual assistance from existing black communities. The church became a focus of community life, and black churches, such as the black Baptist Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, grew robustly and gave rise to other benevolent mutual aid societies.

Some self-improvement societies were raising funds to purchase land, construct schoolhouses, and hire teachers, enabling the newly freed to learn how to read and write. White women sent by the American Missionary Association volunteered as teachers.

Howard University for Negroes, founded by the Freedman's Bureau 2 years earlier, held its first classes in Washington, DC. Detractors continued to ridicule the college because of its policy of admitting students of all ages, male or female, married or single, informed or ignorant.

The newly enfranchised Southern black men were now organizing politically, particularly through the Union League: Northern blacks assisted former slaves to form a network of political clubs to teach civic duties, to campaign for Republican candidates, to represent black grievances before employers and government bureaucracies, and to recruit militias to protect black communities from white retaliation. Black men and women organized parades and rallies, and they assembled mass meetings in the newly constructed black churches. Black men were participating with whites to formulate the new constitutions that provided for universal adult male suffrage regardless of race. Blacks were now holding political office in the South, including in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Both Northerners and Southerners harbored attitudes toward black women who openly challenged conventional Victorian standards of female submissiveness, considering these women particularly insolent.(5)

spoke up bold as brass [and with their] loud and boisterous talking, [demanded fair treatment for] we people [left] way back.

[T]rembling with indignant suspicion [she] looked on grimly or broke out in fits of passion.… "Don' you give down to it, Peter," she exhorted. "It ain't no how ris'ible that we should 'a' worked all the year and git nothin' to go upon."

The 4-year-old Freedmen's Bureau had its greatest success in teaching literacy to thousands of blacks, particularly those who wanted to read the Bible. There were now some 300,000 blacks attending the 4,300 bureau schools. In one North Carolina elementary class four generations sat together. In other areas, however, the accomplishments of the bureau were less than stellar. It had been authorized to settle former slaves on 40-acre tracts confiscated from plantations, hardly any land was given to blacks. Local administrators actually collaborated with planters in cajoling town blacks to sign labor contracts to work on plantations. (Without capital, the blacks had little to offer but their labor, and thousands of them, along with thousands of landless poor whites, became sharecropper farmers--essentially serfs, slaves to the soil and to their creditors.) Nonetheless, white Southerners resented the Freedmen's Bureau as a threat to their dominance.

Northerners, called "carpetbaggers," and Southerners, called "scalawags," had joined the Republican Party to carry out the congressional Reconstruction program in the South. These Republican regimes in the former Confederacy introduced some badly needed reforms: streamlining tax systems, launching public works, guaranteeing property rights for women, and establishing adequate public schools. Some of these governments were ridden with graft, however--especially in Louisiana and South Carolina, where unscrupulous promoters used naïve blacks as pawns. According to historian John Garraty(6):

Legislators paid themselves large salaries and surrounded themselves with armies of useless, incompetent clerks. Half the budget of Louisiana in some years went for salaries and "mileage" for representatives and their staffs. In South Carolina the legislature ordered an expensive census in 1869, only one year before the regular federal census was to be taken. Large sums were appropriated for the building of imposing state capitols and other less-than-essential buildings. As for corruption, in The South During Reconstruction Professor E. Merton Coulter has described dozens of defalcations of various sorts that occurred during these years. One Arkansas Negro took $9,000 ($126,990 in 2006 dollars) from the state for repairing a bridge that had cost only $500 ($7,055) to build. A South Carolina legislator was voted an additional $1,000 in salary ($14,110) after he had lost that sum on a horse race. A judge in Louisiana contrived to sell a state-owned railroad worth several million for $50,000 ($705,500).

Dangerously defiant white Southerners cursed the "damnyankees" and referred to the federal government as "your government." Persisting in their conviction that their view of secession was the correct one and that the "lost cause" was a just war, they admitted of no crime in their rebellion. Here were the words to a popular song:

Oh, I'm a good old rebel,
Now that's just what I am:
For the "fair land of freedom"
I do not care a dam.
I'm glad I fit against it--
I only wish we'd won,
And I don't want no pardon
For anything I done.

With muffled horse hooves, the besheeted night riders of the 4-year-old "Invisible Empire" of the white-supremacist Ku Klux Klan, directed by its Grand Wizard, former slave trader and Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, 48, continued to break up black prayer meetings and invade black homes at night to steal firearms. The group was formally dedicated to resist Reconstruction and all activities of the Republican Party. Determined to force blacks to "keep in their place," they terrorized, flogged, mutilated, and murdered "upstart" ex-slaves and carpetbaggers. Here were some verses from one of their terrifying broadsides, including the carpetbagger Union League in its list of enemies:

Niggers and Leaguers, get out of the way.
We're born of the night and we vanish by day.
No rations have we but the flesh of man--
And love niggers best--the Ku Klux Klan:
We catch 'em alive and roast 'em whole,
Then hand 'em around with a sharpened pole.
Whole Leagues have been eaten, not leaving a man,
And went away hungry--the Ku Klux Klan.

President Grant, in his inaugural address, expressed his back-handed determination that the reconstruction laws be obeyed(7):

I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws as effective as their stringent execution.

Military rule authorized by the 2-year-old harsh Reconstruction Acts continued in the South. Here is from a South Carolina Democratic newspaper, saying that Reconstruction would end when the Union Army is pulled out of the South(8):

These constitutions and governments will last just as long as the bayonets that ushered them into being, shall keep them in existence, and not one day longer.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 54, pictured left, and Susan Bromwell Anthony, 49, pictured right, organized the National Woman Suffrage Association. Anthony had broken with the 3-year-old American Equal Rights Association to campaign and lecture on the need for a Constitutional amendment that would give all American women the right to vote. They agitated, without success, to get the word sex added to the "race, color, or previous condition of servitude" list in the proposed Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Since they could not get the amendment to include women, they opposed its adoption(9):

American women of wealth, education, virtue, and refinement… [should oppose the Fifteenth Amendment] if you do not wish the lower orders of Chinese, Africans, Germans, and Irish, with their low ideas of womanhood to make laws for you and your daughters.

My reply is this: Do you believe the African race is composed entirely of males?

Lucy Stone, 51, pictured here, organized the American Woman Suffrage Association, with Henry Ward Beecher, 58, as its president.

In the unfamiliar era of big money and expanding government following the Civil War, corruption flourished. Waste, extravagance, speculation, graft, and fraud at all levels in the United States created such a fetid, contaminated atmosphere during this "Era of Good Stealing" that it was said the Man in the Moon had to hold his nose when passing over America. According to historians Bailey, Kennedy, and Cohen(10):

Unscrupulous stock-market manipulators were a cinder in the public eye. Too many judges and legislators put their power up for hire. Cynics defined an honest politician as one who, when bought, would stay bought.

Undersized and cunning Roxbury, NY, native and robber baron financier Jay Gould, 33, corpulent conspired with impudent robber baron financier James "Diamond Jim" (also known as "Jubilee Jim") Fisk, 35, who liked to parade in public with "cuddlesome women." Along with other freebooters, they attempted to corner the gold market, thereby profiting handsomely when the federal government redeemed Civil War-issued greenbacks with gold. They worked on President Grant directly, and they bribed Grant's brother-in-law, a financier named Abel Rathbone Corbin, 61, with $25,000 ($352,750 in 2006 dollars) to keep the Treasury Department from selling gold. Corbin convinced Grant to hire Union veteran General Daniel Adams Butterfield, 38, the composer of the bugle lullaby "Taps," as Assistant U.S. Treasurer; Butterfield was willing to tip off Gould and Fisk when the government was about to release gold. Then, with mad bidding in the late summer, the two robber barons began buying large amounts of gold, causing prices to rise and stocks to plummet. By hoarding, they drove the price of gold up to $162 per ounce ($2,284 per ounce in 2006 dollars) by noon on Black Friday, September 24, nearly destroying half the banks and businesses in New York City. The premium on a gold Double Eagle (representing one ounce of gold bullion at $20 {$282.20 in 2006 dollars}) was 30 percent higher than when the President had taken office. Finally, contrary to Grant's supposed assurances, Treasury Secretary George Boutwell dumped $4 million ($56.4 million) in government gold on the market, thereby breaking the bubble and bringing its price down to $133 ($1,875 per ounce) within 15 minutes. Gould and Fisk slipped out from under the collapse, but hundreds of investors were ruined. According to the carefree Fisk(11):

Nothing is lost save honor. Let everyone carry out his own corpse.

Harper's Weekly cartoonist German immigrant Thomas Nast, 29, drew caricatures attacking the Tweed Ring of New York City--burly, 240-pound State Senator William Marcy "Boss" Tweed, 46, Mayor Abraham Oakey Hall, 43, the city comptroller, the city chamberlain, and others--which had been bilking the city treasury out of as much as $200 million ($2.8 billion in 2006 dollars). Tweed's cynical motto was

Addition, division, and silence

Meanwhile, Gould, Fisk, and Daniel Drew had formed a triumvirate controlling the Erie Railroad. They had by now extended its original route between New York and Buffalo all the way to Cleveland, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. It was now beginning to tap the markets of Chicago and other important cities. It boasted the following in its advertisements(12):

1,400 miles under one management; 860 miles without a change of cars; the broad-guage, double-track route between New York, Boston, and New England cities and the West.

In spite of boastful advertisements, Gould and Tweed and a few other unscrupulous railroad promoters often left gullible buyers of bonds with only "two streaks of rust and a right of way" (making rails out of steel rather than iron would solve the rust problem).

Industrialists, almost all of them identified with the Republican Party and enjoying the tariffs that that party had secured, continued building new factories. These businessmen constituted a new class of gaudy, brassy, noisy, extravagant millionaires, plutocrats who defended their unbridled capitalism and their heartless contempt of the poor by adapting the theory of Charles Darwin: survival of the fittest.

The value of manufactured products in the U.S. was $3.4 billion ($48 billion in 2006 dollars), an 83% increase in just a decade. Some 2.3 million horsepower was employed in manufacturing.

Approximately half of all U.S. working people still worked on farms, but that number was shrinking. More and more Americans, formerly self-employed farmers or artisans, were becoming wage earners toiling in the new factories, continually fearing unemployment from swings in the business cycle or simply from arbitrary whims of the businessmen. There were now 2 million wage earners in factories and small industries. The sweat of these laborers was lubricating the robust new industrial machine, but the laborers themselves shared very little of the benefits enjoyed by the plutocrats. Like the Roman galley slave, the worker was merely an unskilled and easily replaced lever puller for a depersonalized, soulless, conscienceless corporation.

The bloody war had been such a drain on human resources, however, that there was a premium on labor, and workers were more and more organizing themselves into unions. The 3-year-old 600,000-member National Labor Union, headed by William H. Sylvis, 41, attracted the skilled, the unskilled, and farmers, but it excluded Chinese and made only nominal efforts to include women and blacks. It continued to lobby Congress to promote workers' interests, agitating for the arbitration of labor disputes and for an 8-hour workday. During the preceding year, Congress had passed the Eight-Hour Law, providing an 8-hour working day for federal employees. (In private industry, most workers still toiled for 10 to 12 hours per day, however.

Black workers had organized their own Colored National Labor Union as an adjunct. But since the blacks tended to support the plutocrats' Republican Party, and since the white unionists were persistently racist, the two unions could not work together in a common effort.

A group of garment cutters, including Uriah Smith Stephens, 48, whose Garment Cutters' Association had been dissolved under pressure from employers, met in Philadelphia and organized the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor as a secret society with passwords, handshakes, and its own private ritual. Such secrecy forestalled possible reprisals from employers.

The 41st Congress enacted the Public Credit Act, authorizing the payment of U.S. debts in gold. Paper money ("greenbacks") worth $356 million ($5 billion in 2006 dollars) were left in circulation, however.

Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, was paved with wooden blocks for a mile between 1st Street and the Treasury Department building at 15th Street.

Baltimore merchant Alexander Hecht opened the Hecht Company dry-goods store in Washington, DC.

Inventor Sylvester Marsh, 66, completed his cog railroad with special engines, which took apprehensive passengers to the top of 6,293-foot Mount Washington in New Hampshire's White Mountains.

A cable connection with France was completed at Duxbury, MA.

Jewelers William P. Shreve, Charles H. Crump, and George D. Low opened Shreve, Crump & Low on Washington Street in Boston.

Boston annexed Dorchester.

Boston shipbuilder Donald McKay, 59, launched The Glory of the Seas, his last sailing ship--240 feet long, 2,000 tons burthen--which would remain in service for 54 years.

The Massachusetts State Legislature established the first state board of health.

Charles William Eliot, 35, professor of chemistry at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was named president of Harvard College. He began his career there by demanding that students be given written examinations--"A majority of the students cannot write well enough," he said--but the Harvard Medical School refused to go along with the demand, at least at first. Eliot also moved to contain all undergraduate studies within the college and to develop graduate and professional schools. According to Eliot, a truly useful education included a commitment to public service, specialized training, and a capacity to change and adapt. His goal went well beyond Emersonian self-actualization for its own sake. He felt that specialized expertise could be harnessed to public purposes(13):

When the revelation of his own peculiar taste and capacity comes to a young man, let him reverently give it welcome, thank God, and take courage. Thereafter he knows his way to happy, enthusiastic work, and, God willing, to usefulness and success. The civilization of a people may be inferred from the variety of its tools. There are thousands of years between the stone hatchet and the machine-shop. As tools multiply, each is more ingeniously adapted to its own exclusive purpose. So with the men that make the State. For the individual, concentration, and the highest development of his own peculiar faculty, is the only prudence. But for the State, it is variety, not uniformity, of intellectual product, which is needful.… As a people we do not apply to mental activities the principle of division of labor; and we have but a halting faith in special training for high professional employments. The vulgar conceit that a Yankee can turn his hand to anything we insensibly carry into high places, where it is preposterous and criminal. We are accustomed to seeing men leap from farm or shop to court-room or pulpit, and we half believe that common men can safely use the seven-league boots of genius. What amount of knowledge and experience do we habitually demand of our lawgivers? What special training do we ordinarily think necessary for our diplomatists? -- although in great emergencies the nation has known where to turn. Only after years of the bitterest experience did we come to believe the professional training of a soldier to be of value in war. This lack of faith in the prophecy of a natural bent, and in the value of a discipline concentrated upon a single object, amounts to a national danger.

French naturalist Leopold Trouvelot brought the gypsy moth (Porthetria dispar) to Medford, MA, with hopes to start a silk industry in New England. The larvae would defoliate American woodlands as the moth population exploded over the following two decades.

Francis Asbury Pratt, 42, director of his 4-year-old Pratt & Whitney Company in Hartford, CT, invented a metal-planing machine.

The Stanley Rule & Level Company of New Britain, CT, bought the patent rights and business of Leonard Bailey, who had invented a metal plane with a cutter that could be adjusted easily by turning a nut.

James Gordon Bennett, 28, editor of the New York Herald, commissioned Welsh immigrant correspondent Henry Morton Stanley, 28, to find Scots missionary David Livingstone, 56, presumed lost somewhere in the jungles of Africa.

Investment banker Marcus Goldman and his son-in-law Samuel Sachs founded Goldman, Sachs & Company in a one-room basement in New York City.

George P. Rowell published the first open, accurate list of American newspapers, thereby stabilizing the advertising business in the U.S.

Equitable Life Assurance Society of New York City wrote more than $50 million ($705 million in 2006 dollars) worth of new policies, more than all the leading British insurance companies combined.

New York City department store baron A. T. Stewart designed the planned community of Garden City, Long Island, for families of moderate income.

The 10-year-old Great American Tea Company of merchant George Huntington Hartford, 36, and George P. Gilman, at 31 Vesey Street in New York City, directly buying entire clipper-ship cargoes of Chinese and Japanese tea and then selling to consumers at less than a third what their competitors were charging, was renamed to the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (the A&P) to capitalize on the new transcontinental rail link. Hartford and Gilman offered premiums to lucky winners, using cashier cages in the form of Chinese pagodas, offering band music on Saturdays, and employing other other promotional efforts. The grocery line included tea, baking powder, condensed milk, soap, coffee, and spices.

Albany, NY, printer John Wesley Hyatt, 32, and Rockford, IL, inventor Isaiah Smith Hyatt obtained a patent on a product they named celluloid (even though it had been patented already 14 years earlier by Alexander Parkes), which could be a substitute for ivory, horn, amber, tortoise-shell in the manufacture of billiard balls, piano keys, men's collars, buttons, dental plates, combs, and other items.

The so-called Cardiff Giant--a stone figure of a man more than 10 feet long, weighing nearly 3,000 pounds--was "discovered" in Cardiff, NY, a hoax promoted as a petrified man "proving" Genesis 6:4 about "giants in the earth in those days" and exhibited in Syracuse, Albany, New York City, and Boston, for an admission fee of $1 ($14.11 in 2006 dollars).

Rutgers beat Princeton 6 to 4 in the first intercollegiate football game, played at New Brunswick, NJ.

Vineland, NJ, dentist Thomas Bramwell Welch picked 40 pounds of Concord grapes from his backyard, pasteurized the juice from the harvest in his wife's kitchen, bottled it, and began selling the temperance substitute "unfermented wine" to nearby churches--the beginning of Welch's Grape Juice.

Philadelphia fruit wholesaler Joseph Campbell and icebox maker Abram Anderson opened a cannery (much later Campbell Soup Company) in Camden, NJ, for canning small peas and fancy asparagus.

Ursinus College was founded outside Philadelphia.

Henry John Heinz, 24, and L. C. Noble founded the Heinz & Noble Co. in Sharpsburg, PA, to process horseradish in clear bottles (competing with those who pack their horseradish in green bottles to disguise the fact that the bottles contained turnip fillers).

The increase in U.S. literacy had spurred a demand for more lighting.(14)

Kerosene was no longer the only valuable petroleum product, however. By now refiners were learning how to "crack" petroleum

by applying high temperatures to the crude in order to break up and rearrange its molecular structure, thus increasing the percentage of kerosene yielded. By-products such as naphtha, gasoline (used in vaporized form as an illuminating gas), rhigolene (a local anesthetic), cymogene (a coolant for refrigerating machines), and many lubricants and waxes began to appear on the market.(15)

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Quoted from Garraty, op. cit., p. 506. (Close)

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During this year, Pennsylvania oil wells produced 4.8 million barrels of crude oil.

Pennsylvania State College was founded in Pittsburgh.

The Cincinnati Red Stockings, as of the previous year the first all-professional baseball team, were now salaried. They finished the season undefeated, winning 56 games and tying one.

The Maxwell House hotel in Nashville, TN, opened.

Purdue University was founded in Lafayette, IN.

Roughly 500,000 tons of shipping--mostly wheat and iron ore--passed through the "Soo" (Saulte Ste. Marie) canal between Lakes Superior and Huron, a fivefold increase in less than a decade.

Bearded and rotund Chicago preacher Dwight Lyman Moody, 32, weighing nearly 300 pounds, a former shoe salesman who adapted old-time religion to the facts of city life, could hold huge audiences spellbound. Not only did he operate the largest Sunday School in the city as well as the 1,500-capacity Illinois Street Church, but he was the national president of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA).

The National Prohibition Party was founded in Chicago, demanding that the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages be outlawed.

The 2-year-old Chicago meatpacking firm Armour and Company of Philip Danforth Armour, 37, and John Plankinton added beef to its line of pork products.

The Pennsylvania Railroad established a connection with Chicago and St. Louis.

Fresh meat was shipped from Chicago to Boston on the refrigerated railcar that had been developed the year before by William Davis, now 57. Rail barons, however, resisted losing their lucrative traffic in live animals bound for markets in the East.

Chicago livestock dealer Joseph Geating McCoy, 31, arranged for cattlemen to bring some hundreds of thousands of head of Texas longhorn cattle over the "Long Drive" on the Chisholm Trail to his Abilene, KS, holding pens and then ship them from there over the Kansas Pacific Railway to Chicago. The Kansas Pacific paid him an eighth of the freight charges on each car of cattle he shipped to the beef-hungry East.

Southern Illinois University was founded in Carbondale.

The Chicago & Rock Island Railroad purchased from the Grant Locomotive Works of Paterson, NJ, an eight-wheel super steam locomotive that had been built for the Paris International Exposition 2 years earlier, with a boiler encased in German silver, with solid silver headlights, handles, whistles, and pumps.

Arabella Mansfield was admitted to the Iowa bar.

The Grange, or the Patrons of Husbandry, with its secret rituals, passwords, and hierarchies (from Laborer to Husbandman for men, from Maid to Matron for women) founded 2 years earlier by Oliver H. Kelley, now 43, continued to grow in popularity among the farmers of the Midwest. Its stated aim was to enhance the lives of isolated farmers with educational, social, and fraternal activities--picnics, concerts, lectures in schoolhouses around potbellied stoves--with an emphasis on reading and discussion, much of that concerning freight rates, high taxes, and politics.

The 7-year-old Homestead Act, designed to stimulate the family farm and to encourage a rapid population growth in the West, authorized any U.S. citizen, or any alien intending to become a citizen, to take 160 acres of Western land (a quarter section) for just a $10 registration fee ($141.10 in 2006 dollars), provided that he make certain improvements and that he live on the tract for 5 years. Alternatively, the settler might acquire land after only 6 months of residence for a nominal price of $1.25 per acre ($17.64 per acre in 2006 dollars). Either way, the land acquired was to be exempt from attachment for debt. Tens of thousands of settlers applied for homesteads each year, a third of them actually receiving land. This act augmented immigration.

James Frederick Joy of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad completed the Hannibal Bridge across the Missouri River at Kansas City, MO, for the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad.

The University of Nebraska was founded in Lincoln.

Wyoming Territory granted women the right to vote and to hold public office.

Just 2 weeks before the completion of the world's first transcontinental railroad line, Central Pacific trackmen, mostly Chinese immigrants, racing eastward to meet the westward-moving Union Pacific crews, mostly Irish immigrants, laid a record 10 miles of track in a single day, laying 35,200 60-pound rails and spiking some 24,000 8-foot-long cross ties. The line was completed in May, 7 years short of the deadline set by Congress, as the Union Pacific Railroad, extending 1,090 miles westward from Omaha, NE (built with $27 million [$381 million in 2006 dollars] in government "loans" on 13 million acres of public land), met the Central Pacific Railroad, extending 689 miles eastward from Sacramento, CA (built with similar government subsidies and land grants), at Promontory Point, near Ogden in Utah Territory. Two locomotives, one from each side, "facing on a single track, half a world behind each back," gently touched cowcatchers. Officials of the the two railroads broke a champaign bottle in celebration. Central Pacific president Leland Sanford, 45, with an awkward silver sledgehammer, clumsily drove the last spike, a ceremonial golden one, bearing the following legend:

May God continue the unity of our Country as the Railroad unites the two great Oceans of the world.

Americans throughout the country celebrated the achievement, comparing it to the Declaration of Independence and the emancipation of the slaves. Jubilant officials in Philadelphia rang the cracked Liberty Bell in Independence Hall. Travel time between New York City and San Francisco had now been reduced to just 8 days, down from a minimum of 3 months (and often two to three times that long). The West Coast was now bound more firmly to the Union, and a flourishing trade with Asia was enhanced.

During this year, railroad companies--those in the East as well as the new transcontinental trunk line--purchased $41.6 million ($559 million in 2006 dollars) worth of railroad cars and locomotives.

In their construction efforts, Union Pacific Railroad directors and other insiders had formed the Crédit Mobilier company, cleverly hiring themselves to build the transcontinental line and sometimes paying themselves as much as $50,000 a mile for construction that cost only $30,000 a mile ($672,000 and $403,000 in 2006 dollars). The company had once paid dividends of 348%. To stave off investigation into the high personal profits they were making, they had furtively distributed shares of the lucrative stock to U.S. Congressmen. The Crédit Mobilier company was dispersing a yearly average of $67,000 ($900,000) for "legal expenses," which were actually thinly disguised bribes to stave off government investigations into corruption.

While on tour of the West, General Philip Henry Sheridan, 38, encountered Comanche Chief Tochaway (Turtle Dove), who introduced himself as a "good Indian." Here was Sheridan's reply:

The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.

It cost an estimated $2 million a year ($28.2 million a year in 2006 dollars) to maintain a single U.S. Army regiment on the Great Plains, and the federal government spent $1 million ($14.1 million) for each Indian killed in battle. In response to the problem, Congress created a distinguished nonpolitical Board of Indian Commissioners to oversee Indian affairs, but bureaucrats in Washington, DC, prevented any reforms from being instituted. According to a biographer of one of the commissioners(17):

Their recommendations were ignored… gross breaking of the law was winked at, and… many matters were not submitted to them at all.… They decided that their task was as useless as it was irritating.

No branch of the national government is so spotted with fraud, so tainted with corruption, so utterly unworthy of a free and enlightened government, as this Indian Bureau.

The 10-year-old reservation for the confederated bands of Pima and Maricopa tribes near the Gila River was enlarged from 64,000 arid acres to 145,000 just-as-arid acres.

Chiracahua Apache Chief Cochise, 57, continued to lead his warriors out of his hideout in the Dragoon Mountains of Arizona in raids against white settlers.

Commercial (and other white) buffalo hunters were systematically slaughtering the buffalo in large numbers, often deliberately to undermine the way of life of the Indians, who used the animal for food, housing, bowstrings, lariats, and fuel. Replacing this magnificent animal more and more was the Texas longhorn cattle, brought in by cattlemen who discovered how well the hardy stock survived the winters on the plains foraging on the seemingly limitless forage left behind by the buffalo. By this year there were a million longhorns grazing in Colorado Territory alone.

Explorer-geologist John Wesley Powell, 35, who had lost an arm in the Battle of Shiloh 7 years earlier, navigated the Green and Colorado Rivers for more than a thousand miles in Utah Territory and Arizona Territory, and he explored the Grand Canyon.

Bank of California officers William Ralston, William Sharon, and Darius Ogden Mills founded the Virginia & Truckee Railroad to haul silver and other minerals out of Nevada mines.

Classes finally began at the 12-year-old tuition-free University of California in Oakland.

Hundreds of Chinese immigrants were fleeing the disintegrating Chinese Empire, risking the penalty of beheading to do so, almost all from the southern district of Toishan, and coming to the United States, at an annual rate during this decade of 6,430. Most were men (the ratio was 13 males for each female). Some came with money pooled by their families back home, but most were desperately poor and in debt to Chinese middlemen, which they would need to repay in cruel conditions of indenture for years. The indenture business was known ignominiously as "pig selling." Chinatowns were springing up in railroad towns, farming villages, and cities, where the immigrants could speak their own language and seek safety from prejudice and violence. Many organized themselves into tongs (secret societies).

There were street riots in San Francisco against Chinese laborers.

Cigarette smoking began to catch on with men in the general public. Brand names included Opera Puffs, Bon Ton, Fragrant Vanity Fair, Turkish Orientals, Three Kings, Old Rip, Old Judge, and Canvas Back.(19)

Men were now cutting their hair shorter, with parts extending from the front all the way back to the nape of the neck. Some men wore pompadours. Muttonchops and beards under the chin were in vogue. Many men were wearing "sideburns" in imitation of (and named for) Union General Burnside. Women frequently wore a bun or chignon, arranged in loops and braids, with puffs, ringlets, or coils over the ears.

Americans now bathed an average of once a week.

Science and technology in America: Specifics

Arts and culture in America: Specifics

Novelist Louisa May Alcott, 37, published Little Women: Or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy; humorist Josh Billings began his publication of Josh Billings' Farmer's Allminax, a parody of The Old Farmer's Almanac; author and humorist Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), 32, published The Innocents Abroad about his tour of Europe and the Holy Land; author Bret (Francis Brett) Harte, 33, published The Outcasts of Poker Flat; and Harriet Beecher Stowe, 58, and her sister Catherine E. Beecher published The American Woman's Home, deploring the popularity of store-bought bread (which accounted at that time to no more than 2 percent of all the bread eaten in the country).

Sculptor Thomas Ball, 50, unveiled his equestrian statue of George Washington in the Public Garden of Boston.

Popular periodicals included the Lippincott's Magazine, Farmer's Home Journal, Harper's Bazaar, Sporting Times, Niles' Weekly Register, the American Journal of Science, American Farmer, Christian Watchman, Saturday Evening Post, Good Health, Godey's Lady's Book, Ladies' Repository, Peterson's Ladies' National Magazine, Home Journal, Home Monthly, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Frank Leslie's Boys of America, Harper's Weekly, Yale Literary Magazine, Carriage Monthly, Phunny Fellow, National Police Gazette, Illustrated Police News, and Scientific American.

"Sweet Genevieve" by Henry Tucker and George Cooper, 31, was released and became popular, as did "Shoo Fly, Don't Bother Me" by Frank Campbell and Billy Reeves. Other popular songs included "Sweet By and By," "The Little Brown Jug," "When You and I Were Young, Maggie," "Clementine (Down by the River Lived a Maiden)," "The Flying Trapeze," "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen," "Battle Hymn of the Republic," "Listen to the Mockingbird," "Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair," "Camptown Races," "Turkey in the Straw," and "Amazing Grace."

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The 6-year-old worldwide cholera epidemic continued.

Irish-Americans belonging to the the Irish Republican Brotherhood (the Fenians movement) to free Ireland from the United Kingdom continued crossing the Niagara River from the U.S, into Canada, drawing attention to the Fenian cause.

Irish immigrant merchant Timothy Eaton, 35, opened the T. Eaton Co., Ltd. dry-goods store on Yonge Street in Toronto.

The 199-year-old Hudson's Bay Company sold 95 percent its Northwest Territories to the Dominion of Canada for $1.5 million ($21.2 million in 2006 dollars).

Red River Rebellion

Cuban rebellion

Argentine newspaper publisher Ottavio Paz founded La Prensa in Buenos Aires.

The British Parliament passed the Contagious Diseases Act, permitting police constables to arrest female prostitutes but took no action against male customers of those prostitutes.

The British Parliament passed the Customs Duty Act, abolishing even nominal duties on food imports.

Debtors' prisons were abolished in the United Kingdom.

A speaker at the annual meeting of the British Medical Association condemned "beastly contrivances" for limiting the numbers of offspring.

Girton College, Cambridge, was founded.

The sailing ship Cutty Sark was launched in England for the tea trade and set sail on the 117-day voyage for Shanghai, with 28 crewmen to handle the clipper's 10 miles of rigging and control her 32,000 square feet of canvas.

Emperor Napoleon III, 61, reintroduced parliamentary government in France.

French chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouries, 52, who had invented margarine 2 years earlier, now produced the product commercially. The product was patented in England and became known there as "butterine."

The First Nihilist Congress convened in Basel, Switzerland.

Postcards were introduced in Austria.

The Staatsoper (State Opera House) opened in Vienna.

Skoda Works opened in Pilsen, Bohemia.

The Cortes (legislative body) set up a constitutional monarchy in Spain.

The First Vatican Council met in Rome. Pope Pius IX, 77, declared that abortion of any kind was an excommunicatory sin. He also advocated a definition of papal infallibility.

The Ottomans suppressed the Cretan revolt of native Greeks and followed up with an ultimatum against Greece, which agreed to evacuate the island.

European expansion into North Africa

German explorer Gustav Nachtigal, 35, traveled through the Sudan and the Sahara in northern Africa.

The north-south 105-mile-long 196-feet-wide 38-foot-deep Suez Canal, connecting the Mediterranean and the Red Seas, opened in November in a ceremony by French Empress Eugènie de Montijo, 42. Oriental ports were brought 5,000 miles closer to Europe, 3,600 miles closer to America.

The benevolent Muslim despot Mahbub Ali Pasha began rule as the Nizam of Hyderabad in India, ordering his nobles and landlords to stop collecting rents when times were bad and opening the state grain stores to Hindus and Muslims alike when harvests were poor.

The coffee rust (Hamileia vastatrix) appeared in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and spread throughout the Orient and the Pacific over the following two decades, wiping out coffee plantations and causing soaring coffee prices.

The daimyos of the four great feudal clans in Japan--the Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa, and Hizen clans--surrendered their authority to Emperor Meiji Mutsihito, 17, and were made governors of their former provinces.

American Baptist missionary Jonathan Scobie invented the rickshaw in Yokohama, Japan, to transport his invalid wife around the city.

American entrepreneur William Copeland opened the Spring Valley Brewery in Yokohama, and began marketing the beer that would later be known as Kirin Beer.

Japan's first public elementary school opened in Kyoto.

World science and technology

German medical student Paul Langerhans, 22, discovered the "islets of Langerhans" in the pancreas, which produced glucagon and insulin; English surgeon Joseph Lister, 42, was able to reduce the death rate by 67 percent using his antiseptic techniques; and German pathologist Rudolf Virchow, 48, established the German Anthropological Society.

German botanist Nathanael Pringsheim, 46, discovered the primitive sexual reproduction form known as conjugation.

English amateur astronomer Sir Joseph Normann Lockyer, 33, started the science magazine Nature.

German biologist and philosopher Ernst Heinrich Philipp August von Haeckel, 35, an advocate of Darwin's organic evolution theory, coined the term ecology to denote environmental balance.

English physicist Lord Rayleigh (John William Strutt) explained the electromagnetic theory in lay terms; Russian chemist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev, 35, began to formulate his periodic law for the classification of the elements; and Belgian engineer Zénobe Gramme invented the Gramme dynamo.

World philosophy and religion

Arts and culture in the British Isles

World arts and culture

French Impressionist artist Édouard Manet, 37, exhibited The Execution of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico and The Balcony.

German Romantic composer Richard Wagner, 56, produced the opera Das Rheingold; German composer Johannes Brahms, 36, produced Liebeslieder Walzer; Austrian composer Anton Bruckner, 45, produced Mass in E minor at the incomplete Linz Cathedral; Norwegian composer Edvard Hagerup Grieg, 26, produced Concerto in G minor for Piano and Orchestra in Copenhagen; Russian composer Nikolai Andreievich Rimski-Korsakov, 25, produced Symphony No. 2 (Antar) in St. Petersburg; Russian composer Aleksandr Borodin began work on his opera Prince Igor; and Russian composer Petr Ilich Tchaikovsky, 28, produced the lyrical fantasy overture Romeo and Juliet in Moscow. German composer Karl Loewe died at the age of 73, and French composer Hector Berlioz died at the age of 66.

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