August 11

Born in New York on the 11th in 1833, Robert Green Ingersoll was a colonel in the Union Army during the American civil war. After the war, he entered into the political life of his adopted state, Illinois. He was a man of many talents, but he was a particularly gifted orator during the Golden Age of Freethought in the late 19th century. He must have been an easy-going and well-liked man whose glowing reputation spread across the nation he so selflessly served, which can be the only explanation for the naming, in his honor, of Colonel Bob Mountain, which is conveniently located in the Colonel Bob Wilderness Area on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.