July 9

On the 9th in 1850, Millard Fillmore became the 13th president of the United States upon the death of Zachary Taylor. He was the second person to become president upon the death of his predecessor. In a column, which was intended to be humorous, published on December 18, 1917 in the New York Evening Mail, H. L. Mencken wrote that Fillmore had the first bathtub installed in the White House. Much to the Fillmore families chagrin, this has been widely accepted as true.

Whenever I come across someone who was the second of anything, my first impulse is to find out who was first. In this instance it was John Tyler who became the first to achieve that honor upon the death of William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States, who died 31 days after his inauguration in 1841