Tag: Very Old Places

Jayne Mansfield’s notorious crash, 50 years later (New Orleans, LA)

Somewhere in the night between June 28 and 29, 1967, the car driving Jayne Mansfield, her lawyer, and her children between Biloxi, Mississippi, and New Orleans slid under a tractor trailer on Highway 90 near Slidell and the Rigolets. Jayne, her lawyer, and the driver were killed instantly. Her children were treated at New Orleans’s Charity Hospital and survived with relatively minor injuries. Gruesome rumors arose that Jayne had been decapitated due to blonde hair in crash scene photos. However, Jayne’s embalmer at the Bultman Funeral Home (corner of St. Charles and Louisiana avenues, New Orleans, now a Fresh Market grocery store) confirmed that she had not been. The hair in the photos was her wig. Jayne is pictured in the attached photo from the San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive with astronaut Wally Schirra.

“Give me liberty, or give me death!”

Patrick Henry, born May 29, 1736, is perhaps most noted (or notorious) for the speech he gave in this place. The Second Virginia Convention met here at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia, in March 1775. When the convention debated raising a militia to push back against King George III on March 23, 1775, almost a year to the day after the Intolerable Acts became law, Patrick Henry made his famous, “Give me liberty or give me death!” speech.

The image comes from a 1901 Detroit Photographic Co. postcard picturing the church interior as seen from Patrick Henry’s pew. Image source: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

St. John’s Church still stands at 2401 E. Broad St., Richmond, Virginia, and there are regular guided tours.

The Battle of Yorktown, 1781: Cornwallis’s Surrender

Today (Oct. 19) in 1781, British General Charles Cornwallis surrendered to American forces at Yorktown in Virginia.  It was not technically the end of the American Revolution. The French and Spanish would continue taking shots at Britain under the guise of the American War of Independence until everyone signed a treaty in 1783, but it was the end of major hostilities in the United States.

Cornwallis was feeling “under the weather” (or maybe just sick of losing to Americans), so he sent his second in command to deliver the surrender to George Washington. Washington, who had bested Cornwallis in every way despite his commoner status, wasn’t having it. He sent his own second, Benjamin Lincoln, to accept the surrender while he looked on. The British band accompanied the event with a song called, “The World Turned Upside Down.” Given that this was an event almost entirely without precedent, it was an appropriate choice.

(Photo is a shot of the Surrender Field at Yorktown Battlefield, part of Colonial National Historical Park in Virginia, which also includes Historic Jamestowne.)

Marie Antoinette guillotined today in 1793

Marie Antoinette was guillotined today, Oct. 16, in 1793, in what is now Place de la Concorde. At the time it was called Place de la Révolution and was the site of many public executions including that of her husband, King Louis XVI, in January of the same year.

The obelisk at the center of Place de la Concorde, today a public square and traffic roundabout, was gifted to France by Egypt 40 years later in 1833. It was once one of the pair of obelisks marking the entrance to Luxor Temple. The other, being too heavy to move, is still there. A common name for these obelisks granted by Egypt to other great cities around the world is “Cleopatra’s Needles” after another queen of great renown, although the one in Paris has no connection to her. Another “needle” can be found in New York’s Central Park near the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Fun Facts: Marie Antoinette never said, “Let them eat cake.” The line came from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Les Confessions, where it was attributed to an unnamed “great Princess.” Neither Marie Antoinette nor her extravagant lifestyle were to blame for France’s economic situation after generations of nonstop wars, but she made a convenient scapegoat for the hungry, revolutionary populace.