George Washington spent much of his youth at the 260-acre Ferry Farm near Fredericksburg (though it was not then known by that name).
It was on that farm that he allegedly damaged a cherry tree with his hatchet.
The account of the cherry-tree chopping was created by Mason Locke “Parson” Weems, who included the tale in his 1800 “biography” The Life of Washington. Weems also helped elevate the reputations of such men as Francis “The Swamp Fox” Marion and William Penn.
John Marshall of Virginia, the future Chief Justice, was persuaded to run for Congress as a Federalist by George Washington. Marshall later wrote one of the first multi-volume biographies of the great Revolutionary War hero.
The perennially-hapless Washington Senators baseball team was derided as “Washington: First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League”.
The football huddle was invented at Gallaudet University in Washington DC. Gallaudet was the first university for deaf and hard-of-hearing students in the world. When the Bisons – the school team – noticed other teams were trying to interpret their sign language while they plotted their plays, they gathered around in a circle.
The first use of script lettering on a major league baseball uniform was with Buffalo of the Federal League in 1914. The Buffalo team was officially nicknamed the Bisons, but fans called it the Buffalo Blues or the Buffalo Buffeds (for Bufalo Federals, referring to the league).
Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to the Federal Army of the Potomac, led by Ulysses S. Grant and George G. Meade, at Appomattox Court House, Va. on April 9, 1865.
Although Lee’s surrender is generally considered to mark the end of the Civil War, it wasn’t until May 1865, when Union General Edward Canby accepted the surrender first of General Richard Taylor and then General Edmund Kirby Smith, that all Confederate armies finally laid down their arms.
One of the adventures in The Bullwinkle Show was the search for the legendary Kirward Derby, which turned its wearer into the smartest person in the world. The hat was named after Durward Kirby, a TV and radio personality of the time, best known as being the second banana for Garry Moore and Alan Funt.
Roger Moore first played James Bond in Live and Let Die (1973), which also starred Yaphet Kotto and a very young Jane Seymour.
Yaphet Kotto claims to be a descendant of Queen Victoria, but the Buckingham Palace press office denies this assertion.
In 1976 Ugandan dictator Idi Amin Dada proclaimed himself “the uncrowned king of Scotland,” which he sometimes modified to “the last king of Scotland.” He also asked Buckingham Palace to allow him to visit Great Britain “to meet the heads of revolutionary movements fighting against your imperialist oppression.” His request was denied.
The last king of Great Britain to lead his troops into battle in person was George II at the Battle of Dettingen (against the French) in 1743. It was a British victory and Handel composed the Dettingen Te Deum specially for the celebrations that followed.
G.F. Handel’s magnificent anthem “Zadok the Priest” has been performed at every British coronation since he composed it for George II’s in 1727. It was also performed at the recent wedding of Prince William and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge.
Republican William Jennings Bryan delivered the Cross of Gold Speech, advocating bimetalism, at at the 1896 Democratic National Convention in Chicago on July 8, 1896. The Democratics nominated William McKinley on a platform advocating only the gold standard.
Pssst! You got their parties reversed.
William McKinley was the first US president to ride in a motor vehicle, although he never knew it. His ride was in the ambulance that took him to the hospital after he was shot.
The kingmaker of William McKinley, Republican of Ohio, was Marcus Hanna, who was later elected a U.S. senator from Ohio himself. Hanna is buried in Cleveland’s Lakeview Cemetery, not far from President James A. Garfield, tycoon John D. Rockefeller, and Lincoln aide and later U.S. Secretary of State John M. Hay.
McKinley was also the last Civil War veteran in the White House.
(I may have misspoke earlier when I said he did not know about the ride. Actually, I’m not sure about the state of his consiousness.)
Albert Woolson, who died in Duluth, Minnesota in 1956 was the last verified survivor on either side of the Civil War. Following his death, the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Civil War veterans, was dissolved.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Republican of New York, defeated Adlai Stevenson, Democrat of Illinois, for the second time in a row when he won a second term in the White House in 1956.