Report of Boaed of General Manageks. 37 



The Columbian Celebration in New York October 10-12, 1892. 



Under the provisions of the law creating this beard and of those of 

 chapter 331, relating to the celebration in the city of New York and 

 making the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America, a State 

 holiday, the date of that observance was fixed on the 12tli of October, 

 1892. The act of Congress creating the World's Columbian Commis- 

 sion prescribed the same date for the national celebration at Chicago 

 and for the formal dedication of the exposition Ijuildings: It was 

 deemed by this board to be desirable to prevent, if possible, any 

 appearance of rivalry between the elaborate celebration projected in 

 New York and that which had to take place in Chicago. It was 

 thought that both would be deprived of some of their lustre by being 

 made simultaneous. Special weight was given to the consideration 

 that a iitting representation of the State at both would be impossible 

 if they occurred on the same day. New York could as little afford to 

 deprive its own celebration of due official recognition as it could to be 

 conspicuous by its absence from the assemblage of State officers and 

 public bodies at the place selected for the ceremonial having a national 

 significance. 



After long consideration on the subject, Hon. John Boyd Thacher, a 

 member of this board, publicly proposed that the date of the dedica- 

 tion ceremonies in Chicago should be changed from October 12 to 

 October 21, 1892, and gave forth the following reasons for the change : 



The celebration of the landing of Columbus, which we shall observe 

 this year, will fix that event in the American mind, especially in the mind 

 of Young America, indelibly. When we say that Columbus landed on 

 October twelve, we refer to the old or Julian calendar and not to the 

 Gregorian calendar, adopted in 1582 and used throughout the Christian 

 world except in Russia. If we are to be exact in commemorating the 

 400th anniversary of the Columbian discovery, our celebration must fall on 

 the twenty-first of October, which corresponds, according to the Gregorian 

 calendar, with the twelfth day of October of the Julian calendar. It 

 requires the dropping of just nine days to make an event which is marked 

 in the Julian calendar as happening in the fifteenth century, agree with the 

 true astronomical, tropical date. After 1582 ten days were dropped to 

 correct the false date or old style. England did not adopt the Gregorian 

 calendar -till 1 75,3,- when it beeasnc necessary to drop eleven days. Besides 

 the propriety of correcting the date, we have the best of precedents in 



