Brooklyn Kings New York United States

Walt Whitman produces his first book of poetry, the autobiographical Leaves of Grass, on July 4, 1855.

Self-published and poorly received, several of the book’s poems feature graphic depictions of the human body, enumerated in Whitman's innovative "cataloging" style, which contrasts with the reserved Victorian ethic of the era. (There is no definitive edition of Leaves of Grass—Whitman continually revised his masterwork, adding and occasionally removing poems. Despite its revolutionary content and structure, subsequent editions of the book will evoke critical indifference in the U.S. literary establishment, but outside the U.S., the book will become a worldwide sensation, especially in France, where Whitman's intense humanism will influence the naturalist revolution in French letters,)

The Brooklyn, Bath and Coney Island Rail Road starts operations in Brooklyn, New York, on October 5, 1863; this is today the oldest right-of-way on the New York City Subway, the largest rapid transit system in the United States, and one of the largest in the world.

Charles Pratt, a pioneer of the U.S. petroleum industry, had established his kerosene refinery Astral Oil Works in Brooklyn, New York, then lived with his growing family in Brooklyn's Clinton Hill neighborhood.

An advertising slogan is "The holy lamps of Tibet are primed with Astral Oil."

Born in Watertown, Massachusetts, Pratt was one of eleven children.

His father, Asa Pratt, was a carpenter.

Of modest means, he had spent three winters as a student at Wesleyan Academy, and is said to have lived on a dollar a week at times.

In nearby Boston, Massachusetts, Pratt had joined a company specializing in paints and whale oil products.

In 1850 or 1851, he had come to New York City, where he worked for a similar company handling paint and oil.

When Pratt met Henry Huttleston Rogers at McClintocksville on a business trip, he already knew his partner, Ellis, having earlier bought whale oil from him back east in Fairhaven.

In 1861, the then twenty-one-year-old Henry had pooled his savings of approximately US$600 with a friend, Charles P. Ellis.

They had set out to western Pennsylvania and its newly discovered oil fields.

Borrowing another US$600, the young partners had begun a small refinery at McClintocksville near Oil City, naming their new enterprise Wamsutta Oil Refinery.

The old Native American name "Wamsutta" had apparently been selected in honor of their hometown area of New England, where Wamsutta Company in nearby New Bedford had opened in 1846, and is a major employer.

The Wamsutta Company had been the first of many textile mills that had gradually come to supplant whaling as the principal employer in New Bedford.

In their first year of operation, Rogers and Ellis and their refinery had made US$30,000, an amount greater than the earnings of three whaling ship trips during an average voyage of more than a year's duration.

When Rogers returned home to Fairhaven for a short vacation the next year, he had been greeted as a success.

While vacationing in Fairhaven in 1862, Rogers had married his childhood sweetheart, Abbie Palmer Gifford, who was also of Mayflower lineage, and who had returned with him to the oil fields where they lived in a one-room shack along Oil Creek where her young husband and Ellis worked the Wamsutta Oil Refinery.

While living in Pennsylvania, their first daughter, Anne Engle, had been born in 1865.

They will have five surviving children together, four girls and a boy.

Although Ellis and Rogers have no wells and are dependent upon purchasing crude oil to refine and sell to Pratt, the two young men had agreed to sell the entire output of their small Wamsutta refinery to Pratt's company at a fixed price.

This had worked well at first until, a few months later, crude oil prices suddenly increased due to manipulation by speculators.

The young entrepreneurs had struggled to try to live up to their contract with Pratt, but soon their surplus had been wiped out, and they became heavily in debt to Pratt.

Charles Ellis had given up, but in 1866, Henry Rogers had gone to Pratt in New York and told him he would take personal responsibility for the entire debt.

This had so impressed Pratt that he had immediately hired him for his own organization, making Rogers foreman of his Brooklyn refinery, with a promise of a partnership if sales run over $50,000 a year.

The Rogers' family had moved to Brooklyn, and Rogers had moved steadily from foreman to manager, and then superintendent of Pratt's Astral Oil Refinery.

Henry Huttleston Rogers, the son of Rowland Rogers, a former ship captain, bookkeeper, and grocer, and Mary Eldredge Huttleston Rogers, was born in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, on January 29, 1840.

Both parents were of English descent and were descended from the Pilgrims who arrived in the seventeenth century aboard the Mayflower.

His mother's family had earlier used the spelling "Huddleston" rather than "Huttleston."

Henry Huttleston Rogers has accomplished and exceeded the substantial sales increase goal that Charles Pratt had set when recruiting him.

As promised, Pratt gives Rogers an interest in the business, forming Charles Pratt and Company in 1867.

Henry Huttleston Rogers, while working with Charles Pratt, invents an improved way of separating naphtha, a light oil similar to kerosene, from crude oil.

He is granted U.S. Patent # 120,539 on October 31, 1871.

In the past few years, Rogers has become, in the words of Elbert Hubbard, Pratt's "hands and feet and eyes and ears" (Little Journeys to the Homes, 1909)

As their family grows, Henry and Abbie continue to live in New York City, but vacation frequently at Fairhaven.

The Brooklyn Theater Fire, a catastrophic theater fire that breaks out on the evening of December 5, 1876, in the city of Brooklyn, New York, claims the lives of at least two hundred and seventy-eight individuals, with some accounts reporting more than three hundred dead.

One hundred and three unidentified victims are interred in a common grave at Green-Wood Cemetery.

An obelisk near the main entrance at Fifth Avenue and 25th Street marks the burial site.

More than two dozen identified victims are interred individually in separate sections at the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn.

The Brooklyn Theater Fire ranks third in fatalities, among fires occurring in theaters and other public assembly buildings in the United States, falling behind the 1942 Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire and the 1903 Iroquois Theater Fire.

Fatalities mainly arose in the family circle, a gallery of inexpensive seats high in the auditorium.

Only one stairway serviced this gallery, which sustained extreme temperatures and dense, suffocating smoke early in the conflagration.

The stairway jammed with people, cutting off the escape of more than half of the gallery's occupants who quickly succumbed to smoke inhalation.