Delaware, U.S., Marriage Records, 1750-1954
Past In Review from 04-29-2004
This week in Delaware history
By Roger A. Martin
Middletown
April 29, 1875: Rosina J. Saulsbury, wife of former Governor Gove Saulsbury died in Dover. She was not even 47 years old. 1942: Pvt. Dick Masten Appel of Ellendale, captured at the fall of Corregidor, died of pneumonia as a POW in Bataan. 1967: The Delaware State News moved to its new location in Dover at the intersection of Webb's Lane and New Burton Road. 2000: A Delaware state monument costing $300,000 was unveiled on the Gettysburg, Pa. Civil War battlefield.
April 30, 1876: John Cochran, 3rd son of Governor John Cochran, died near Middletown of typhoid fever in his 35th year. 1913: A 10 1/2 acre park was opened along the Delaware River in New Castle. A dance pavilion, 24 beach houses and a carousel were erected and band concerts provided. The new facility was renamed Ocean Beach Park. 1937: Dr. Wallace Carothers of Wilmington, the inventor of nylon and a self-confessed schizophrenic, poisoned himself in a Philadelphia hotel. 2000: Arnold Blankenship, III, a Greenwood firefighter, was killed during a training exercise when he became trapped in a farmhouse attic west of Bridgeville.
May 1, 1748: The last Nanticoke Indians left their reservation at Laurel for the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania. 1898: Tom Mix, later Hollywood western movie star, guarded military installations in New Castle County as a US Army artilleryman. 1944: Despite severe wartime labor shortages, Sussex farmers refused to allow Japanese-Americans (who were not prisoners) to help in getting in the crops. 1947: Augustine Beach Park near Port Penn opened the summer season with the feature attraction of an eight-girl marimba band and an all-girl review of singing and dancing.
May 2, 1804: The first excavations for the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal were begun near Glasgow. 1941: Lexington, the 65-acre Major Philip Reybold estate near Delaware City was purchased to make way for King's College. The original site lies today beneath the Motiva Refinery. 1945: Captain Warren W. Grier, Jr. of Wilmington became one of the last soldiers killed in World War II Germany. 1956: The John Dickinson Mansion near Dover was first opened to the public.
May 3, 1688: Construction of a prison in Lewes was finally completed. 1780: The Delaware Battalion embarked at Elkton, Md. for the British Southern Campaign. 1801: Methodist minister John Thelwell opened the first school for blacks in Wilmington. 1819: Ebenezer M. Fogg traveling from Salem, N.J. to Philadelphia, stopped off at Pea Patch Island and remarked about the construction of Fort Delaware underway.
May 4, 1848: Warren Jefferson, state senator from Concord and unsuccessful Democratic candidate for governor in 1840, shot himself through the heart in a “temporary derangement of mind.” 1946: Two hundred and seventy German POWs, the last of 4,300 held in the state during WW II, left Fort Du Pont in Delaware City for home. 1951: Nationwide publicity was brought to Newark when University of Delaware students camped out on the lawn after having been kicked out of their dorms. 1957: State troopers raided a disorderly house on U.S. 40 and arrested 38 men and 22 women, among whom were several prostitutes.
May 5, 1819: Governor John Clark pardoned John Rutter of New Castle County for murder on the condition that he leave the state and never return.
1845: Samuel H. Adams of the senior class of Delaware College (University of Delaware) from Northampton County, Va. died after an illness of four days. 1848: The arrival of the steamboat Zephyr linked Philadelphia with Dona Landing six miles east of Dover on Delaware Bay where a new hotel had just been built. 1941: The legislature enacted legislation allowing Sussex County Levy Court to build an airport in Georgetown. During World War II, it was used as an auxiliary training facility for Cape May County Naval Air Station, NJ.
