Joseph Naylor Chapman (1843 - 1916)

Refresh this page to see various historical events that occurred during Joseph's lifetime.

In 1843, in the year that Joseph Naylor Chapman was born, on May 22nd, an estimated 700 to 1,000 pioneers set out from Missouri on the Oregon Trail. Called "The Great Migration of 1843", the wagon train often had to build roads or float down rivers.

In 1854, Joseph was only 11 years old when on February 28th, the GOP - the Republican Party - was founded in Ripon, Wisconsin by "modernizers", anti-slavery proponents, ex-Whigs, and ex-"Free-Soilers" - who opposed the expansion of slavery. The first Republican President of the United States was Abraham Lincoln.

In 1862, when he was 19 years old, on July 1st, the Bureau of Internal Revenue was created. Established to raise funds for the Civil War, income tax was supposed to be temporary and was allowed to expire 10 years later. The Internal Revenue Service was created in the early 20th century.

In 1875, he was 32 years old when on February 18th, the Mason County War, also called the Hoodoo War, began. In central Texas, a German-American mob broke into a jail with a battering ram and lynched two suspected cattle rustlers. Thus began a year of vigilante "justice."

In 1916, in the year of Joseph Naylor Chapman's passing, suffragette Jeannette Pickering Rankin became the first woman elected to the House of Representatives as a Representative at large from Montana. She was the first woman to hold an elected Federal office. Holding the office for two years, she ran again in 1940 and served another two year term. Montana had granted women unrestricted voting rights in 1914, 6 years before women got the vote nationally.