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Wikipedia: Diocletian Lewis
Diocletian Lewis (March 3, 1823 – May 21, 1886), commonly known as Dr. Dio Lewis, was a prominent temperance leader and physical culture advocate who practiced homeopathy and was the inventor of the beanbag.
Temperance crusading[edit]
In the 1870s, Lewis and his mother began leading groups of followers into saloons to pray for their closure. He later lectured in churches claiming miraculous results from conducting such “Visitation Bands”. Lewis’ actions and lectures inspired others to similar action, thus initiating the Women’s Crusade against alcohol.
Lewis gave a public address in Hillsboro, Ohio, on his fall tour through Ohio called “Our Girls”, that advocated physical exercise and an active life for women. On Sundays he spoke on “The Duty of Christian Women in the Cause of Temperance”. In these lectures he instructed women to ask local dispensers of alcoholic beverages to sign pledges that they would cease to sell. Upon refusal, the women should begin prayer and song services in these establishments. He urged women to be the sole participants in these acts, in order to aggrandize the emotional force of the movement.
Women took to the snowy streets, and within three months of their first march, they had driven the liquor business out of 250 towns. By the time the marches ended, over 912 communities in 31 states and territories had experienced the crusades.
It was and is still the largest mass movement of women to date…. [Frances Willard], the second national president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, wrote later in her memoirs, that the crusade “was like the fires we used to kindle on the western prairies, a match and a wisp of grass were all that was needed, and behold the spectacle of a prairie on fire sweeping across the landscape, swift as a thousand untrained steeds and no more to be captured than a hurricane”.[9]
Lewis claimed that, as a result of them, more than 17,000 drinking establishments were abandoned in Ohio alone in a period of two months. Most of the saloons that closed as a result of prayer vigils opened again a few days later to meet the public demand for alcoholic beverages.[10]
Blog post about Silsby Manufacturing Company
Blog post about the evolution of fire prevention and response
Blog post about electrical fires in the era after the advent of alternating current but before effective fire control
Blog post about the Seneca Falls fire of 1890
New York Times January 6, 1868, Page 2
THE STEREOPANTASCOPE.–At the Church of the Holy Trinity, Rev. STEPHEN H. TYNG, Jr. corner Madison-avenue and Fort-second street, this evening, there will he an exhibition of stereoscopic views, magnified by a a camera five the times, and illuminated with the hydro-oxygen light.
Episode 28: The Relative Valuation of Little Girls and Bears
Syracuse On This Day 