Byron Historical Society

03/30/2023

If you are thinking of getting off FB because of the volume of sales ads and trash stuff. So hold your finger anywhere in this post and click ′copy’. Go to your page where it says ‘What's on your mind?’ Tap your finger anywhere in the blank field. Click paste. This upgrades the system.

01/01/2023

12/21/2022

The winter solstice marks the official beginning of astronomical winter. The winter solstice occurs once a year in each hemisphere: once in the Northern Hemisphere (in December) & once in the Southern Hemisphere (in June).

12/19/2022

Red poinsettias are a traditional Christmas flower throughout much of the world. The poinsettia, Euphorbia pulcherrima, is a member of the Euphorbiaceae or spurge family. This colorful plant was discovered near the present-day city of Taxco, Mexico and the valleys surrounding Cuernavaca (in southern Mexico). While we know the plant as an indoor plant, in Mexico poinsettias grow to be large woody shrubs, often reaching 10 feet tall.

The ancient Aztec Indians of Mexico cultivated and regarded this plant as a symbol of purity before Christianity came to the western hemisphere. They called the plant cuetlaxochitl which means “mortal flower that perishes and withers like all that is pure.” (While the meaning is inspirational, aren’t we glad that we don’t have to say this name?)

The Aztecs found many uses for the plant. The cuetlaxochitl was a symbol of the new life earned by warriors who died in battle. They also used the plant’s red bracts to make a reddish-purple dye used in textiles and cosmetics. They crushed and applied the plant to skin infections, or placed plant parts on a person’s chest to stimulate circulation. The Aztecs made a medicine, to treat fevers, from the plant’s milky white sap, called latex. Today the Poinsettia is primarily an ornamental plant with little medicinal applications.

After the conquest, during the 17th century, Spanish Franciscan priests in Mexico began using the poinsettia in the Fiesta of Santa Pesebre, a nativity procession. They used the poinsettia because of its appropriate holiday color and blooming time.

Poinsettias were introduced to the United States by Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first appointed U.S. ambassador to Mexico. In 1825 while visiting Taxco he became enchanted with the red blooms and sent some plants to his home in Greenville, South Carolina. Poinsett, a skilled botanist, propagated the plants and began distributing the plants to friends and various botanical gardens. Within a few years, plants eventually reached Robert Buist, a nurseryman, who is believed to be the first person to sell the plant in the United States. In 1833, the plant was given the common name poinsettia, the name-sake of Joel Poinsett.

The poinsettia industry was pioneered and developed by the Ecke family. In the 1920’s, Albert and Paul Ecke began field growing poinsettias in the Hollywood and Beverly Hills area. Today the Paul Ecke Ranch located in Encinitas, California is the major producer of poinsettia mother plants used for cuttings by commercial growers.

Today, no holiday scene would be complete without a poinsettia. The modern poinsettia only slightly resembles the tall, leggy, red plant that grew wild throughout Central America.

The poinsettia we see today comes from many years of breeding and engineering. During the mid-1950’s plant breeding research began and has led to many the current improved varieties and cultivars. Today’s poinsettia is a free-branching hybrid plant with larger, longer lasting bracts. Hybridizing has resulted in colors including: cream, yellow, peach, pink, salmon, and marbled. Red poinsettias still account for more than 70 percent of sales.

Congress has given the poinsettia recognition by declaring December 12 as national poinsettia day. This day honors Joel Poinsett who died on December 12, 1851. Observe national poinsettia day by giving this beautiful plant as a gift.

12/07/2022

On this day back in Dec. 7th 1941, 2,403 Americans were killed and 1,178 wounded in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor... Today we remember them

11/13/2022

In the pre-dawn hours of November 12, 1833, the sky over North America seemed to explode with falling stars. Unlike anything anyone had ever seen before, and visible over the entire continent, an Illinois newspaper reported “the very heavens seemed ablaze.” An Alabama newspaper described “thousands of luminous bodies shooting across the firmament in every direction.” Observers in Boston estimated that there were over 72,000 “falling stars” visible per hour during the remarkable celestial storm.

The Lakota people were so amazed by the event that they reset their calendar to commemorate it. Joseph Smith, traveling with Mormon refugees, noted in his diary that it was surely a sign of the Second Coming. Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman, among many others, described seeing it. It became known as “The Night the Stars Fell.”

So, what was this amazing occurrence?

Many of those who witnessed it interpreted it as a sign of the Biblical end times, remembering words from the gospel of St. Mark: “And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken.” But Yale astronomer Denison Olmsted sought a scientific explanation, and shortly afterwards he issued a call to the public—perhaps the first scientific crowd-sourced data gathering effort. At Olmsted’s request, newspapers across the country printed his call for data: “As the cause of ‘Falling Stars’ is not understood by meteorologists, it is desirable to collect all the facts attending this phenomenon, stated with as much precision as possible. The subscriber, therefore, requests to be informed of any particulars which were observed by others, respecting the time when it was first discovered, the position of the radiant point above mentioned, whether progressive or stationary, and of any other facts relative to the meteors.”

Olmsted published his conclusions the following year, the information he had received from lay observers having helped him draw new scientific conclusions in the study of meteors and meteor showers. He noted that the shower radiated from a point in the constellation Leo and speculated that it was caused by the earth passing through a cloud of space dust. The event, and the public’s fascination with it, caused a surge of interest in “citizen science” and significantly increased public scientific awareness.

Nowadays we know that every November the earth passes through the debris in the trail of a comet known as Tempel-Tuttle, causing the meteor showers we know as the Leonids. Impressive every year, every 33 year or so they are especially spectacular, although very rarely attaining the magnificence of the 1833 event.

The Leonid meteor showers are ongoing now and are expected to peak on November 18. But don’t expect a show like the one in 1833. This year at its peak the Leonids are expected to generate 15 “shooting stars” per hour.

November 12, 1833, one hundred eighty-nine years ago today, was “The Night the Stars Fell.”

The image is an 1889 depiction of the event.