March 24

George Francis Train was born on the 24th in 1824 in Boston, Massachusetts. When he was four years old, both his mother and his father died from yellow fever and his rather strict Methodist grandparents raised George thereafter. I am undecided if this personal tragedy had a ruling impact on George’s life. While it must have had a great affect on him, I can only wonder if it was the reason that he became both a successful businessman and a certifiable crackpot. While not necessarily the inspiration for Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in 80 Days, he did travel around the World three times, on one of the trips convincing the Queen of Spain to build a railroad through the backwoods of Pennsylvania. For the first trip, he left Tacoma, Washington and completed the journey in 67 days. Because of his interest in public affairs, he conducted a national campaign for his election to the position of Dictator. At his campaign rallies, he would charge a fee for admission and made a great deal more money doing so. He financed Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s newspaper The Revolution. He ended his days sitting on a park bench in New York’s Central Park, handing out dimes, feeding the pigeons and speaking to no one other than children and animals. He died on January 5, 1904 and was buried in Brooklyn, New York’s beautiful Green-Wood Cemetery.

Train was a member of the Thirteen Club, whose members had a thing about the superstition surrounding the number thirteen. Robert Green Ingersoll, a member in 1886, ended a toast by saying “We have had enough mediocrity, enough policy, enough superstition, enough prejudice, enough provincialism, and the time has come for the American citizen to say: Hereafter I will be represented by men who are worthy, not only of the great Republic, but of the Nineteenth Century.”
Despite their involvement in the suffragist movement, both Anthony and Stanton would actively lobby against both the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution and extending the vote to black men, on the theory that doing so would simply result in more men voting against extending the vote to women..