The Lincoln’s knew how to throw a party.  Abraham Lincoln’s second Inaugural Ball took place March 4, 1865, the evening after he had been sworn into office for a second term. (It was not until the 1930s that the inauguration of presidents was changed to January.) Counting the ticket sales and the formal invitations four thousand people attended the ball.  The event was a spectacular success and a spectacular mess.      The government patent office was the only building large enough for the event.  Now, you may wonder why the Patent Office had such a huge building.  Well, it’s because they had to store and display the thousands of models required of each patent filed. Don’t ask me what the Patent Office did with the models to make room for the ball.      Newspapers in the big cities, Washington, New York, and Philadelphia wrote similar reports of the event. I have chosen to reproduce the account from the Washin...

  SWILL MILK KILLS    May 1858, Frank Leslie's Weekly Illustrated   depicted a nearly dead cow hoisted up off the manure covered floor in a New York City whiskey distillery "dairy farm" for one last milking.      In May 1858, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper, Harper Weekly’s major competitor, ran an early example of investigative reporting.   Many whiskey distilleries had a side business –dairy farming.   Well, not farming exactly unless you consider examples such as Johnson’s Whiskey Distillery on West 16 th St with three long barns housing 2,000 cows in narrow stalls fed nothing but Johnson’s used up barley and corn mash.   Heated scalding hot, it was sluiced into the troughs in front of the captive cows.        T he stalls were not cleaned, so the cows had to lie down in their own manure and urine. When they stood up twice a day to be milked, the udders were not cleaned and neither were the milkers’...