April 29: Green-Wood’s comptroller, Joseph Perry, reports on this date in 1842 that an agreement has been reached with the Schermerhorns to purchase 85 acres from them at $350 per acre. The Schermerhorns soon built their mausoleums on the land that they had owned and sold to Green-Wood.
April 28: On this date in 1837, John Britton was born. He would serve in the Civil War as major of the 18th Pennsylvania Cavalry, fighting in 48 battles and being severely wounded several times. Years later, he lost his eyesight as a result of one of those wounds; he died in 1897.
April 27: Imre Kiralfy, producer of theatrical spectaculars around the world, died on this date in 1919. Photo courtesy of the Owen Family.
April 26: Poet Alice Cary was born on a farm near Cincinnati, Ohio, on this date in 1820; she and her sister Phoebe came to New York City and became the center of a literary circle.
April 25: On this date in 1854, Firemen Henry Christman and Andrew Schenck, as well as 10 other firemen, were killed in a fire in Manhattan where the Woolworth Building now stands.
April 24: Henry Warner Slocum, who served as a major general during the Civil War, holding Culp’s Hill at Gettysburg and serving as General William Tecumseh Sherman’s right-hand-man on the March to the Sea, as well as serving as a Congressman from Brooklyn, died on this date in 1894.
April 23: In 1863, on this date, Spiritualism, which had been invigorated by the Fox family’s “Rochester Rappings” (and the subsequent promotion by Anne Leah Fox of seances with her sisters Kate and Margaret), achieved a new high when a seance was held in the White House with President Abraham Lincoln, Mary Todd Lincoln, and several cabinet members
April 22: On this date in 1861, as the Civil War was beginning, Colonel Abraham Vosburgh led the 71st New York State Militia to Washington, D.C., to defend the nation’s capital against Confederate attack.
April 21: Dandy Johnny Dolan, convicted of the murder of brush manufacturer James Noe, was hung until dead for his crime on this date in 1875.
April 20: Henry Chadwick, “The Father Of Baseball” who created the scoring system that is still in use today (for example, 6-4-3 for a play from the shortstop to the second baseman to the first baseman) emerged from a coma on this date in 1908, asked if his beloved Dodgers had won, was told they had lost, and died.
