Thomas Jefferson proposed dividing the American Midwest into 10 states with Greek and Latin names: Sylvania, Michigania, Chersonesus, Assenisipia, Metropotamia, Illinoia, Saratoga, Polypotamia, Pelisipia, and Washington.

“While we may see the reasons for these names, we may be thankful that they did not prevail,” wrote Curtis Manning Geer in The Louisiana Purchase (1904). “Ohio is better than Pelisipia, and Wisconsin to be preferred to Assenisipia.”

John Patterson, who died in 1886 at age 96, performed a sort of geographical hat trick by passing the 19th century in the lower Mississippi Valley. His epitaph reads:

I was born in a kingdom
Reared in an empire
Attained manhood in a territory
Am now a citizen of a state
And have never been 100 miles from where I now live.

The kingdom was Spain, the empire France, the territory Louisiana, and the state Arkansas.

During the Black Hawk War, Abe Lincoln was leading 20 men through a field when he saw they’d need to pass through a narrow gate.

“I could not, for the life of me, remember the proper word of command for getting my company endwise, so that it could pass through the gate,” he later recalled.

“So, as we came near, I shouted, ‘Halt! this company is dismissed for two minutes, when it will fall in again on the other side of the gate.'”

One day the elderly soldier [Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington] chanced on a small boy weeping bitterly and on asking the cause the child began to explain that he was going away to school next day … not waiting to hear more the Duke read him a severe lecture on his attitude, which was cowardly, unworthy of a gentleman and not at all the way to behave, etc. At last the little boy managed to explain he was not crying because he was going to school, but he was worried about his pet toad, as no one else seemed to care for it and he wouldn’t know how it was. The Duke, a just man, apologized to the child for having wronged him, and being human as well as just, took down the particulars and promised to report himself about this pet. In due course the little boy at school received a letter saying ‘Field-Marshal the Duke of Wellington presents his compliments to Master —– and has the pleasure to inform him that his toad is well.’

— G.W.E. Russell, Collections and Recollections, 1963

After the First Battle of Manassas, a reporter for the Richmond Dispatch discovered a Confederate soldier tending to a wounded Union infantryman.

“Yes, sir, he is my brother Henry,” he said. “The same mother bore us, the same mother nursed us. We met for the first time in four years. I belong to the Washington Artillery, from New Orleans–he to the First Minnesota Infantry. By the merest chance I learned he was here wounded, and sought him out to nurse and attend to him.”

“Thus they met,” the reporter wrote, “one from the far North, the other from the extreme South–on a bloody field in Virginia, in a miserable stable, far away from their mother, home and friends, both wounded–the infantry man by a musket ball in the right shoulder, the artillery man by the wheel of a caisson over his left hand. Their names are Frederick Hubbard, Washington Artillery, and Henry Hubbard, First Minnesota Infantry.”

“The sound of Niagara Falls outdates our most cherished antiquities.” — J.O. Urmson