250 and Counting

Author: Claude Call

  • September 14, 1775: John Henry Hobart

    Cover art for September 14, 1775: Painting of John Henry Hobart by J. Paradise, engraved by J.C. Buttre, approximately 1830

    John Henry Hobart was born on this day in 1775, and he came that close to dying on the same day in 1830, on September 12.

    We read once that, statistically, men tend to die before “big” dates, e.g. birthdays and major holidays, while women tend to die afterwards. In Claude’s family anyway, it does have a ring of general truth to it.

    Go figure.

    Although Hobart was an Episcopalian minister (and later Bishop), he was the pastor to Elizabeth Ann Seton, our first American saint. (Seton converted to Catholicism in 1805.)

    While Hobart was quite active in the New York City area, he also felt the need for higher education in the western reaches of the state, and established Geneva College (later Hobart College) in the Finger Lakes region. By the time he died, he’d established a church in most major towns in New York and begun missionary work among the Oneida Indians.

    It’s not 100% clear what caused his death, but it was likely a chronic intestinal infection that affected his health in later years.

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  • September 13, 1775: A Flag Makes Its Debut

    Cover art for September 13, 1775: Image of the South Carolina flag with the blue field extended to fit the canvas parameters. retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_South_Carolina#/media/File:Flag_of_South_Carolina.svg

    Let’s talk state vexillology.

    Believe it or not, there are people who are very passionate about state flags. (Not me, he said, about to go into a mini-rant.)

    Most states have a very utilitarian purpose. They kind of lean in, announce themselves, and lean out again.

    Some flags are weirdly cluttered (New York, New Jersey, West Virginia, Delaware).

    Some flags are rather boring (Alabama, Minnesota).

    Some have heavy symbolism but it’s lost on most viewers (Arkansas, Utah)

    I’ve lived in Maryland almost 25 years and I don’t think I’ve seen a people more obsessed with their state flag:

    Maryland Flag

    Colorado’s flag is all over that state so they must be kind of obsessed, too:

    Colorado Flag

    South Carolina’s flag has symbolism and simplicity going for it, and I have to agree with people who put it in the top tier of state flags.

    Here’s the story of the South Carolina flag and how it got that way.

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  • September 12, 1775: Another Washington Enters the Fray

    Cover art for September 12, 1775: Portrait of William Washington in 1795, by Rembrandt Peale. via Wikimedia Commons.

    We mentioned a while back that John Adams had siblings, as did George Washington. This wasn’t one of them, and as far as anyone can tell, it’s more of a cousin-type relationship.

    William Washington essentially won a bet with his brothers, and his prize was the ability to join the militia in Virginia to fight for independence. From this day in 1775 until 1781 he was engaged in multiple battles against the British in Virginia and the Carolinas. It was in 1781 that his horse was shot out from under him. The fallen animal pinned him down. He was bayoneted and captured, and spent the rest of the war under house arrest in Charleston, SC.

    After the war he remained in South Carolina where he spent some time in the state legislature, but declined to run for governor because, as the story goes, he wasn’t a native Carolinian.

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  • September 11, 1775: One Siege Begins, Another Continues

    Cover art for September 11, 1775: "Siege of Boston" wood engraving (detail), created 1879, artist not cited. via the New York Public Library digital collection.

    As the winter of 1775 approached, George Washington had to think about the state of the siege of Boston. In short, housing and clothing thousands of men in a New England winter is a very different proposition than doing it in the summer.

    So Washington convened his War Council to discuss the possibility of breaking the siege by attacking the city from a different direction.

    Meanwhile up in Canada, General Philip Schuyler takes another run at Fort St. Jean.

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  • September 10, 1775: A Mutiny in Cambridge

    Cover art for September 10, 1775: "Soldiers in Uniform, American Rifleman" (detail), Jean Baptiste Antoine de Verger, 1781

    The riflemen in the Continental Army were a special breed of soldier. They weren’t subject to all the drudge work that most of the other soldiers had to endure.

    The downside to this is, they knew it and they took advantage of it. So when one rifleman got himself in trouble, word got out and suddenly a relatively small problem turns into a relatively big one.

    And while George Washington kinda-sorta recognized this stratification of soldiers, he didn’t do much to discourage it. He did, however, demonstrate more patience with the infantrymen than most people would give him credit for.

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  • September 9, 1775: Landfall in Newfoundland

    Cover art for September 9, 1775: Hurricane Igor makes landfall in Newfoundland in 2010. By NOAA - http://www.nnvl.noaa.gov/MediaDetail.php?MediaID=532&MediaTypeID=1, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11560153

    The Independence Hurricane from September 2 is still going strong, and on this day it made landfall again, this time in Newfoundland, Canada.

    The devastation was immense, and perhaps would have been worse had it happened in modern times (we get it, there are satellites and stuff now). It remains Canada’s worst natural disaster and it’s still in the Top Ten chart for North Atlantic hurricanes.

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  • September 8, 1775: Daniel Boone Moves to Kentucky

    Cover art for September 8, 1775: Portrait of Daniel Boone by Chester Harding, 1820. This is the only portrait of Boone known to have been created during his life.

    As late as the 1970s, pioneers like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone had achieved a kind of mythical status, largely because of fictionalized stories created about them by the folks at Disney.

    Sometimes it gets tough to determine what’s fiction and what isn’t, since they tend to embellish things that may have actually happened for the sake of a story. (Not a knock on Disney, so don’t sue us; that’s a typical practice when it comes to stuff like this.)

    So these folks became larger than life for a while, and it’s not to say that they didn’t hold any importance in American history, but sometimes we have to temper those stories with the fact that these men were, after all, just men with real-life concerns, such as “how am I going to feed my family?” which was pretty much the calculus for the event we discuss today.

    (P.S. the story about Washington and the cherry tree was written long after he died, so don’t count on that one either.)

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  • September 7, 1775: Submarine Warfare is Revolutionary

    Cover art for September 7, 1775: the full-size cutaway model of the American Turtle at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport, UK

    The Turtle, or the American Turtle as it’s often called, was invented by a man who thought it should be possible to stealthily attach a bomb to a ship and then detonate it shortly thereafter, by approaching the ship from under the waterline.

    The Turtle was a brilliant idea in concept, if not in execution. There were just too many things that had to go exactly right for the turtle to successfully execute its design purpose, and when it was first tried in genuine combat on this day in 1775, unfortunately it was not successful.

    But every failure is one step closer to success, right?

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  • September 6, 1775: Washington Appeals Directly to Canadians

    Cover art for September 6, 2025: the first page of Washington's letter to the Canadians. from Library of Congress.

    The Second Continental Congress tried appealing to the Canadian leadership in order to get support for the Independence cause, but they apparently weren’t biting.

    So George Washington tried a different tack: write to the Canadian people themselves. He reasoned that the folks in charge were mostly wealthy landowners who were doing all right financially under British rule. Maybe, he thought, the ordinary Canadian folks weren’t quite so happy with the King.

    He was not, unfortunately, correct in that assessment and nobody was swayed by his argument.

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  • September 5, 1775: Setback in Canada

    Cover art for September 5, 1775: Painting of the Schooner Hannah by John F. Leavitt, date unknown

    American forces began to move on Fort St. Jean in Canada. Unfortunately they ran into a couple of unexpected obstacles on the way, so they had to adjust their approach. This led to a six-week siege of the fort.

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