Events from the Year 1867 in the United States
Incumbents
President: Andrew Johnson (D-Tennessee)
Vice President: vacant
Chief Justice: Salmon P. Chase (Ohio)
Speaker of the House of Representatives: Schuyler Colfax (R-Indiana)
Congress: 39th (until March 4), 40th (starting March 4)
Events
January–March
- January 1: The John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge opens between Cincinnati, Ohio and Covington, Kentucky, becoming the longest suspension bridge in the world.
- January 8: African-American men are granted the right to vote in the District of Columbia.
- February 7: West Virginia University is established in Morgantown, West Virginia. Laura Ingalls Wilder is born near Pepin, Wisconsin.
- March: The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is established (it opens for classes on March 2, 1868).
- March 1: Nebraska is admitted as the 37th U.S. state.
- March 2: Wager Swayne is sworn in as the military governor of Alabama effectively.
April–June
- May 28: Alaska is purchased for $7.2 million from Alexander II of Russia by United States Secretary of State William H. Seward, an event later referred to as “Seward’s Folly.”
- June 15: The Atlantic Cable Quartz Lode mine is named in Montana.
- June 29: Kidder massacre: A Sioux and Cheyenne war party kills U.S. Second Lieutenant Lyman Kidder, along with an Indian scout and ten enlisted men in Kansas.
July–September
- July 2: The first elevated railroad in the U.S. begins service in New York.
- July 17: In Boston, Massachusetts, the Harvard School of Dental Medicine is established as the first dental school in the United States.
- September 30: The United States takes control of Midway Island.
October–December
- October 18: The U.S. takes formal possession of Alaska from Russia, paying $7.2 million.
- October 21: The Medicine Lodge Treaty is signed near Medicine Lodge Creek, Kansas, requiring Native American Plains tribes to relocate to a reservation in western Oklahoma.
- November 15: Oliver Hudson Kelley founds the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry (better known today as The Grange).
- December 2: British author Charles Dickens gives his first public reading in the United States at a New York City theater.
- December 18: 49 people are killed in a train crash in Angola, New York.
Undated
- Yellow fever kills 3,093 in New Orleans.
- An artesian water spring gushes continuously at historic Fountain Point, Michigan.
- From 1867 to 1873, Chinese, Scandinavian, and Irish immigrants lay 30,000 miles (48,000 km) of railroad tracks in the United States.
- The Clarke School for the Deaf opens in Northampton, Massachusetts, becoming the first school for the deaf in the U.S. to teach deaf children how to communicate using the “oral method.”
Ongoing
Reconstruction era: 1865–1877
Births
- January 1: Lew Fields, vaudeville performer (died 1941)
- January 8: Emily Greene Balch, writer and pacifist, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (died 1961)
- February 7: Laura Ingalls Wilder, novelist (died 1957)
- June 8: Frank Lloyd Wright, architect (died 1959)
- December 23: Madam C. J. Walker, African American entrepreneur and philanthropist (died 1919)
Deaths
- January 20: Nathaniel Parker Willis, author, poet, and editor (born 1806)
- March 6: Charles Farrar Browne (“Artemus Ward”), humorist (born 1834)
- May 11: Joseph A. Wright, U.S. Senator from Indiana (born 1810)
- September 3: James A. McDougall, U.S. Senator from California (born 1817)
- November 19: Fitz-Greene Halleck, poet (born 1790)
See also
Timeline of United States history (1860–1899)
References
For more information, please check relevant historical sources and archives.
External links
Media related to 1867 in the United States is available at Wikimedia Commons.