gwmain November 3: Actress Laura Keene, who was on stage at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. on the evening of April 14, 1865, and recognized fellow actor John Wilkes Booth as he ran past her after shooting President Abraham Lincoln, died on this date in 1873.
November 3: Civil War veteran Richard Auchmuty died on this date in 1893 and was soon reunited in his grave at Green-Wood with his leg that was buried earlier that year.
November 2: On this date in 1887, Abram Hewitt and Henry George both got more votes than Theodore Roosevelt in the New York City mayoral election.
November 1: Anna Leah Fox Underhill, who promoted her two younger sisters as leading lights of Spiritualism, died on this date in 1890.
October 31: Josephine Louise Newcomb, who funded Newcomb College at Tulane University in memory of her daughter, was born on this date in 1816.
October 30: Ormsby McKnight Mitchel, astronomer turned Union general, whose nickname was “Old Stars,” died on this date, early in the Civil War, in 1862.
October 29: On this date in 2012, Hurricane Sandy destroyed 300 trees and many monuments at Green-Wood, causing $500,000 in damage.
October 28: On this date in 1886, Ferdinand Ward, a swindler who became known as “the Best-Hated Man in the United States,” went on trial; he would be convicted and imprisoned; upon his release he tried to steal his own son’s trust fund.
October 27: Future president Theodore Roosevelt and Alice Hathaway were married on this date in 1880.
October 26: As a result of the vision and efforts of De Witt Clinton, the Erie Canal, linking the Great Lakes with the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean and making New York City the center of world trade, opened on this date in 1825.