In the late summer of 1812 a Great Lakes merchant captain named Daniel Dobbins arrived in Washington. He had had a dreadful time getting there, and his journey could not have been made more pleasant by the fact that he was bringing some very bad news with him.
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January 2011
In 1776 the Lottery Magazine of London looked toward the troublesome American colonies and—drawing on American writers including the celebrated Dr. Franklin—got off this remarkable census forecast. The tabulated figures in the second column run surprisingly close to actual U.S. census figures; for example, in 1790 the real number was 3,929,000; in 1820, 9,638,000; in 1840, 17,069,000; in 1870, 39,818,000; in 1890, 62,948,000. This accuracy fails after 1890, when the figures projected by the Lottery pundits are too large; but they do hedge their bet by suggesting, in their last paragraph, that “vast luxury and debauchery” in the twentieth century might cut back considerably on population increase. They knew nothing, of course, about the Pill or other recent sophistications of contraceptive science; but quite possibly they would have included them under “debauchery” if they had known. Merritt Ierley, Jr., who sent us this prescient snippet, has prepared a book on the year 1776 that will soon be forthcoming from A S. Barnes & Co., Inc.
On the raw, gusty night of March 1, 1932, in the Sourland Hills of New Jersey, the twenty-month-old son of Charles A. Lindbergh and the former Anne Morrow, their first-born, was kidnapped from his nursery. Discarded nearby was a rough-made sectional ladder with a broken lower rung. A ransom note, with expressions and misspellings that suggested a writer whose first language was German, was left in the nursery. It led, on the night of April a in a Bronx cemetery, to the payment of fifty thousand dollars by an intermediary to a lone extortioner. But the child was not returned. Various hoaxers entered the picture, and underworld emissaries sought vainly to make contact with any gangsters who might have been involved.
On May 12 truckers stopping in woods not far from the Lindbergh home came across the child’s body.
The turn-of-the-century picture below was just discovered and passed on to us by the New Jersey Historical Society. It shows Anna Lindner, whose water colors ran in the last issue. She is sitting in front of her Bayonne home with her niece, Emilie, whose early years Anna chronicled with painstaking devotion in scores of paintings.
In the introduction to Mrs. Theodate Pope Riddle’s account of her rescue from the Lusitania (April, 1975) we said that nothing was known about Mme. Depage and Mrs. Naish. That this is not the case has been called to our attention by a dozen readers, among them Mrs. George D. Rowe of Baltimore, who writes:
I loaned a copy of this issue to a friend, Miss F. May Cooper, who went to England in June of 1915 with the American Red Cross and was transferred to a hospital at Lapanne, near Ostend, Belgium, the following year. She tells me that the head of that hospital was M. Depage and that his wife, Mme. Marie Depage, had been lost on the Lusitania while returning from a fund-raising campaign in America. Her body was washed ashore near Queenstown, Ireland. She remembers very well seeing the grave of Mme. Depage in a small plot near the hospital, overlooking the North Sea. It was enclosed by a low white picket fence and decorated with wreaths of flowers made of bright-colored beads.
In June of 1970, in an article entitled “The Past Springs Out of a Picture,” we ran a photograph (above) identified as “General George Armstrong Custer … with his wife, a maid, and their baby.” We were quickly reminded by our readers that Custer never had a child. What, then, was the baby doing there?
Now, more than five years later, we are astonished to learn that the baby had every reason to be there, for the languid young officer was indeed its father.