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Red Cross :
McDonald’s Restaurant In Perry Florida Damaged By
Hurricane Helene.
More than 1,000 people taking a pleasure trip on New York City’s
East River were drowned or burned to death when a fire swept
through the boat. This was one of the United States’ worst
maritime disasters.
The riverboat-style steamer General Slocum was built in 1890
and used mostly as a vehicle for taking large groups on day
outings. On June 15, the St. Mark’s German Lutheran Church
assembled a group of 1,360 people, mostly children and teachers,
for their annual Sunday School picnic.
The picnic was to take place at Locust Point in the Bronx after
a cruise up the East River on the General Slocum.
At about 9 a.m., the dangerously overcrowded boat left its dock
in Manhattan with Captain William Van Schaik in charge. As the
boat passed 83rd Street, accounts indicate that a child spotted
a fire in a storeroom.
In Washington, D.C. on June 9, 1893, the interior of ramshackle
Ford’s Theatre collapses, causing the deaths of 22 people.
The building—where President Lincoln was shot on April 14,
1865— houses hundreds of clerks employed by the War
Department’s Records and Pensions Division.
An investigation determined the cause of the tragedy was a pier
that had given way during excavation in the basement for an
electric-light plant.
Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1865)
A National Historic Site, Ford’s Theatre today.
On February 19, 1847, the first rescuers reach surviving members
of the Donner Party, a group of California-bound emigrants stranded
by snow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
In the summer of 1846, in the midst of a Western-bound fever
sweeping the United States, 89 people—including 31 members
of the Donner and Reed families—set out in a wagon train from Springfield, Illinois.
After arriving at Fort Bridger, Wyoming, the emigrants decided to
avoid the usual route and try a new trail recently blazed by
California promoter Lansford Hastings, the so-called “Hastings
Cutoff.”
After electing George Donner as their captain, the party departed
Fort Bridger in mid-July.
The shortcut was nothing of the sort: It set the Donner Party back
nearly three weeks and cost them much-needed supplies. After
suffering great hardships in the Wasatch Mountains, the Great Salt
Lake Desert and along the Humboldt River, they finally reached the
Sierra Nevada Mountains in early October.
Despite the lateness of the season, the emigrants continued to press
on, and on October 28 they camped at Truckee Lake, located in the
high mountains 21 kilometers northwest of Lake Tahoe. Overnight,
an early winter storm blanketed the ground with snow, blocking the mountain pass and trapping the Donner Party.
Donner Party Monument at Donner Memorial State Park
Truckee, California.
