175 Calendar

December 8: Dudley Sanford Gregory, who served as the first mayor of Jersey City in 1840 and was later elected to Congress, died on this date in 1874.

December 7: Richard J. Ciuzio, World War II veteran who won 5 battle stars, then worked as a doctor at Methodist Hospital for 50 years, died on this date in 2009.

December 6: DeRobigne Mortimer Bennett, Shaker, herbalist, and free-thinker, died on this date in 1882.

December 5: The Brooklyn Theatre Fire, in which almost 300 theatre-goers died, took place on this date in 1876; soon thereafter, 103 unclaimed bodies would be buried together in a lot at Green-Wood.

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.