World Events of 1885

Grover Cleveland

Washington Mounment circa 1860

Jumbo

• Grover Cleveland started his first term as president

• The world’s first true skyscraper, a 10-story building called the Home Insurance Building, was completed in Chicago.
• The Washington Monument is dedicated after 36 years of construction.
• Louis Pasteur administers a successful rabies vaccination.
• P.T. Barnum’s famous circus elephant, Jumbo, is killed in a train collision.

Thomas H. Boggs Life Details

• According to the 1880 census, he was 46 years old, listed as a preacher, and lived in Mecklenburg County, Virginia.  He was married to Sallie W. (45 years old) and had 5 sons:  James H. (16), Thomas W. (12), Roger W. (10), John G. (8), and Richard (5). 
• Thomas Boggs was deceased by 1904 per a wedding announcement in the Fredericksburg Daily Star dated November 10, 1904.  In this announcement for his son Thomas Withers Boggs, who wed Miss Bessie Mastin Washington, they mention that the groom is a son of the “late Rev. Thomas H. Boggs who was a well-known minister of the Virginia Methodist church.”