Huntington Hall, Lowell, MA

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Huntington Hall/Merrimack Street Depot

By 1904, the building that housed both Huntington Hall and the Merrimack Street Depot had served as the city’s main public gathering place for generations. The City of Lowell and the Boston & Lowell Railroad entered into a joint agreement to build the hall in 1853, providing the railroad with the Merrimack Street Depot and the city with a public hall. Named for the early longtime Lowell mayor, Elisha Huntington, the building housed the hall in its upper stories, and the train depot on its bottom story.

Fort Benton

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Fort Benton, the last trading post on the upper Missouri River. For thirty years this port attracted steamboats all the way from the Mississippi River. It's importance was superceded only upon the arrival of the railroad. In 1867, Union General Thomas Francis Meagher, then acting governor of Montana territory, fell overboard from his steamboat and drowned. His body was never recovered.

St. George, Bermuda

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The excursionists arrived at St. George, Bermuda, on the morning of 11 November, planning to depart for New York on 14 November. They had fair weather for most of the Atlantic crossing, including their first two days in Bermuda, but according to Captain Duncan, on 13 November a “hard gale from SW to North West” momentarily imperiled the ship and postponed departure until 15 November.

Rock of Gibraltar

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 The ship anchored in Gibraltar Bay on the morning of 29 (not 30) June, and most of the passengers spent the planned “day” at Gibraltar as the excursion prospectus suggested, “looking over the wonderful subterraneous fortifications.” Clemens, Slote, and Jackson, together with one other unidentified passenger, “rode on asses and mules up the steep, narrow streets and entered the subterranean galleries the English have blasted out in the rock,” according to Clemens.

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