Today in History, January 15th
On January 15, 1919, a burst tank flooded Boston's North End with molasses. Plus the first Super Bowl and the Miracle on the Hudson.
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January 15 is best known for the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, when a giant storage tank burst and sent a wave of molasses through the city’s North End. The date also saw the first Super Bowl in 1967 and Captain Sully Sullenberger’s “Miracle on the Hudson” landing in 2009.
The big story: The Great Boston Molasses Flood (1919)
It sounds like a joke until you read the numbers. Around lunchtime on January 15, 1919, a steel tank on Commercial Street in Boston’s North End gave way. It stood 58 feet tall and held about 2.5 million gallons of crude molasses, owned by the United States Industrial Alcohol Company. When the bolts at its base burst, the syrup rushed out in a wave first reported at eight feet high. It spread into a sticky flood about 15 feet deep and up to 100 yards wide across two city blocks. The day was unusually warm, and the molasses was hot. Twenty-one people died, about 150 were hurt, and dozens of horses were killed. More than 100 lawsuits followed. A court-appointed auditor spent six years on the case, hearing some 3,000 witnesses, and found that the company’s tank had simply not been strong enough. The claims were settled for nearly $1 million.
More events on January 15
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1559 | Elizabeth I, age 25, was crowned queen of England at Westminster Abbey. (Old Style date) |
| 1777 | A convention at Westminster declared Vermont independent of both the British Crown and the colony of New York. |
| 1831 | Victor Hugo finished writing Notre-Dame de Paris, known in English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. |
| 1870 | A Thomas Nast cartoon in Harper’s Weekly first linked the Democratic Party with a donkey. |
| 1919 | German socialist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were killed by right-wing paramilitaries after a failed uprising in Berlin. |
| 1951 | A West German court sentenced Ilse Koch, the “Witch of Buchenwald,” to life in prison. |
| 1967 | The Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs 35-10 in Los Angeles in the first AFL-NFL championship game, later known as Super Bowl I. |
| 1968 | Jeannette Rankin, 87, led about 5,000 women in a march in Washington against the Vietnam War. |
| 1990 | The Soviet government sent 11,000 troops into Azerbaijan to put down fighting between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. |
| 2001 | Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia anyone can edit, went live. |
| 2009 | Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger landed a passenger jet on the Hudson River after a bird strike knocked out both engines. |
Born on January 15
- 1908: Edward Teller, Hungarian-born physicist who led development of the hydrogen bomb.
- 1918: Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egyptian army officer who became Egypt’s president.
- 1929: Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights leader, born in Atlanta.
Sources
- Boston Shocked by Deadly Molasses Flood, History.com
- What Happened on January 15, History.com
- Martin Luther King Jr. Born, History.com
- Edward Teller, Britannica
- Gamal Abdel Nasser, Britannica
