gwmain

December 4: Caroline Weldon, American Indian advocate and confidante of Chief Sitting Bull, was born on this date in 1844.

December 3: On this date in 1849, Chapel Hill was selected by Green-Wood’s board as “the most suitable location for the erection of a chapel;” but not until 1910 would a chapel be built at Green-Wood in another location.

December 2: On this date in 1872, the Green-Wood board of trustees voted to give historian Nehemiah Cleaveland, who chronicled the cemetery’s early years, a burial lot in recognition of his “literary services.”

December 1: Gamaliel King, architect/builder of Brooklyn’s City (now Borough) Hall, was born on this date in 1795.

November 30: George Tilyou, who created Steeplechase Park in Coney Island in order to entertain the masses, died on this date in 1914; his epitaph reads, surprisingly for a man in the business of making people laugh, “Great Hopes Lie Buried Here.”

November 29: On this date in 1872, just weeks after he was trounced in the presidential election by U.S. Grant, Horace Greeley died.

November 28: Duncan Curry, one of several men at Green-Wood who claimed to have been “The Father of Baseball,” was born on this date in 1812 and died in 1894.

November 27: The 13 murals that were commissioned from Violet Oakley for the Pennsylvania State Capitol were unveiled to large crowds on this date in 1906.

November 26: Francis Bannerman, who became the world’s largest dealer in used military equipment after the Civil War, storing his merchandise on Bannerman’s Island in the Hudson River, died on this date in 1918.

November 25: Henry Brockholst Livingston was born on this date in 1757; he would serve as an officer in the Revolutionary War and become a justice of the United States Supreme Court.