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Marjory Stoneman
Douglas |
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APRIL 7 |
| 1866 Congress appropriates $100,000 for the purchase of Ford's Theatre, the building where John Wilkes Booth had shot Abraham Lincoln almost a year earlier (April 14, 1865). Over the next century, Ford's Theater would be used for a variety of purposes, including as an army medical museum, an office building, and a warehouse. In 1893, another tragedy took place in the building when the floor collapsed, killing 22 and wounding 108. In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a congressional act to
restore the theatre. A $27 million restoration began ten years later and
Ford’s Theatre reopened to the public on February 13, 1968. In 1970,
Congress established Ford's
Theatre National Historic Site as a unit of the National Park Service.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas is born in Taunton Massachusetts. She was an early activist on behalf of the protection of the Florida Everglades. Her popular book, "The Everglades: River of Grass," published in 1947, served to bring public attention to the Everglades at a time when people looked upon the Everglades as little more than a swamp. Later that same year, Everglades National Park would be established as part of the US national park system. |
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