Month: January 2014

January 14: Juliet Corson, who in 1876 opened the first full-fledged cooking school in America, was born on this date in 1841.

January 13: The Steamboat “Lexington” burns in Long Island Sound on January 13, 1840; 139 of the 143 people on board die. Cortland Hempstead, the ship’s chief engineer who died in the disaster, now lies beneath a gravestone decorated with a carving of the ship on fire.

January 12: John Matthews, “The Soda Fountain King,” who pioneered the flavoring of carbonated water, died on this date in 1870. His Green-Wood monument, dressed with gargoyles, soon wins “Mortuary Monument of the Year.”

January 11: The Beecher-Tilton trial, the “Trial of the Century” in which Theodore Tilton sued “The Great Divine,” Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, for having had an affair with Tilton’s wife, begins.

January 10: John Wolfe Ambrose, who mapped New York Harbor, and for whom the Ambrose Lightship, long-stationed at the mouth of New York Harbor, was named, was born on this date in 1838. That ship survives at South Street Seaport.

January 9: On this date in 1855, Sarah W. Kairns, mother of 22 who had died two months earlier, finally is placed in her final resting place at Green-Wood. Sarah, who died at the age of 117 years, 3 months, and 16 days, is the oldest of the more than 500,000 individuals who are interred at Green-Wood.

January 8: Realist painter George Bellows, only 42 years old, dies of a ruptured appendix. An exhibit of his work, “George Bellows,” is now running at The Met.

January 7: Anna Case, lyric soprano with the Metropolitan Opera, who married Clarence Hungerford Mackay (one of the wealthiest men in America) in 1931, died on this date in 1984.

January 6: In the culmination of a lovers’ quarrel over the affections of Josie Mansfield, Edward Stokes guns down Colonel Jim Fisk on the steps of Broadway’s Grand Central Hotel on this date in 1872.