1836 – The Bethel African American Episcopal Church was founded in Indianapolis. Home to the city’s oldest African American congregation, the church was part of the Underground Railroad. This Indiana Historical Marker is located on West Vermont Street, near the building where members met for 147 years. In recent years, a new worship center was opened on Zionsville Road.
1873 – Susan B. Anthony gave a lecture at Hamilton’s Hall in Fort Wayne. Her subject was “American Citizenship, or How I Came to Vote.” The newspaper ad for her appearance stated that she was “under indictment for voting in Rochester, New York.” Admission to the lecture was 50 cents with no reserved seats.
1887 – A brawl erupted in the Indiana Legislature. It was fueled by a bitter disagreement over who should be elected to represent the state in the United States Senate. Shouting and fistfights forced Governor Isaac Gray to call in the police. The headline in the Indianapolis Journal said, “A Very Turbulent and Exciting Scene in the State Senate Yesterday.”
1893 – The USS Indiana was launched in Philadelphia. Over 10,000 people, including President Benjamin Harrison, braved sleet and rain to witness the new battleship slide into the Delaware River. A reporter on the scene wrote that it was “as beautiful a model of marine architecture as ever left a builder’s yards.” The Indiana served in the Spanish-American War as part of the North Atlantic fleet.
1921 – Two passenger trains hit head-on near Porter, killing 37 people. An investigation revealed that engineers on one of the trains had misread warning signals. Newspapers reported that the thunderous crash and the blast of steam escaping from the engines could be heard miles away.
1954 – Doctors began the first mass inoculation of children with the Salk polio vaccine, produced by the Eli Lilly Laboratories in Indianapolis. The clinical trials were the largest ever conducted up to that time, involving over four million children.