gwmain September 7: Captain Robert Willmott of the SS Morro Castle died on this date in 1934 of a heart attack as he tried to bring his ship towards New York Harbor; soon thereafter, the ship caught fire and 135 lives were lost.
September 6: On this date in 1909, explorer and press agent Herbert L. Bridgman received a coded message from Rear Admiral Robert Peary reporting that he had discovered the North Pole.
September 5: The first interments at Green-Wood, of members of the Hanna family, occurred on this date in 1840.
September 4: Stephen Whitney, who would become one of the wealthiest men in America, was born on this date in 1776 and died in 1860.
September 3: Confederate Naval Officer Reid Sanders died from dysentery on this date in 1864 while imprisoned at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor.
September 2: On this date in 1844, Green-Wood purchased 9 acres between land owned by the cemetery and Fifth Avenue from Abraham Schermerhorn.
September 1: James Gordon Bennett was born on this date in 1795; he founded the New York Herald in 1835 and made it the most influential newspaper in America by the time of the Civil War.
August 31: Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi, who was born on this date in 1842, became the first woman to graduate from the Ecole de Medecine in Paris in 1871, then returned to New York to become America’s first professor of pediatrics.
August 30: Luther Bradish, who served in the War of 1812, was New York State’s lieutenant governor 1839-1842, and was president of the New-York Historical Society, died on this date in 1863.
August 29: Henry Bergh, the founder in 1866 of the ASPCA, the first humane organization in the Americas, was born on this date in 1811.