Bath’s Library opened its doors in 1869 – this is its sesquicentennial year! (The library’s first location was in the county courthouse.) But what ELSE was going on at that same time?
*Here in Bath, St. Thomas Episcopal Church laid the cornerstone for the monumental Liberty Street edifice that we all know today. (It’s the oldest church building in the Village.) The Methodist church building was dedicated in Campbell, and First Baptist Church was organized in Addison.
*Over in Rome, the First Vatican Council got under way.
*Our County Fair had its 50th birthday in 1869, but they’d only been using the fairGROUNDS since 1854. They started permanent construction around 1863, creating the fair house, the gatehouse, and the track… all of which were brand-new in 1869, and all of which we still enjoy today.
*Down in Washington, D.C., General Ulysses S. Grant became president, succeeding Andrew Johnson.
*Elizabeth Cady Stanton became the first woman to testify before a Congressional committee, and the Territory of Wyoming became the first U.S. entity to adopt universal suffrage, accepting men and women alike as voters.
*The transcontinental railroad was completed with the driving of the golden spike. Andrew Joseph Russell took the famous photo of that event. Mr. Russell had painted a view of Bath just ten years earlier. The painting, now on exhibit in the Magee House, shows that house, which would be home to Bath’s library (then called the Davenport Library) for 106 years… from 1893 to 1999.
*Over on the other side of the world the Suez Canal was opened. When combined with the transcontinental railroad, the canal would soon make it possible to go “around the world in 80 days.”
*Celluloid, the first plastic, was patented. Jesse James robbed his first bank. Leo Tolstoy published War and Peace. Jules Verne began serializing 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Charles Dickens published a collection of short stories. Mark Twain was editing the Buffalo Express.
*Rutgers beat Princeton 6-4 in the first intercollegiate football game. The Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first all-professional baseball team.
*The elder Theodore Roosevelt (father of the future president) joined with J. P. Morgan and a dozen other men to found the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. (The younger Theodore would later be a founder of the Bronx Zoo.)
*Without President Grant’s knowledge, Erie Railroad magnates Jim Fisk and Jay Gould used their connections in Grant’s administration to try and corner to gold market. They failed, provoking the “Black Friday” financial panic… in part because Grant, once he realized what was going on, took steps to break the conspiracy.
*Austin Steward, who had escaped slavery in Bath to become a wealthy Rochester businessman, a memoirist, an abolition crusader, and an associate of John Brown and Frederick Douglass, passed away in 1869.
*Births that year included Rasputin, whose corruption helped lead to the Bolshevik revolution; Neville Chamberlain, whose appeasement helped ease the way for Hitler; Mahatma Gandhi, who led India and Pakistan to independence; and Typhoid Mary.
*Theodore Roosevelt was 11 years old, and Woodrow Wilson was 13. Henry Ford was 16. Deacon White of Caton was in his second year of professional baseball, catching barehanded for the Cleveland Forest Citys.
*It would be seven years before the telephone was invented, nine years before Glenn Curtiss was born. Neither Germany nor Italy yet existed as countries.
*There were still people living who had fought at Waterloo or New Orleans, or who had known George Washington. Slavery had ended just three years earlier.
*Corning Flint Glass Works was in its first full year in Corning, and Davenport Female Asylum was five years old. Neither Corning nor Hornell had become cities yet… but they wouldn’t have long to wait!