1830 – William R. Hackley recorded in his diary: Rose with the sun. Last night a pilot built schooner the Henry Clay of Baltimore, Captain Alexander Thomson, arrived, she has come out for the purpose of wrecking. After breakfast I went down to the store and read some Baltimore papers. In one of them the removal of Thurston is mentioned. Last night a parcel of Thurston enemies got some music and paraded the street huzzahing for Whitehead a mode of procedure which none but the most contemptible class of the community could have been guilty of and yet I have heard that some men calling themselves gentlemen were in the crowd. A brig from Portland to New Orleans put in this morning. Captain Thomas Rooke came down for me to go up to the reef hunting with him. I will here note two recipes I heard today. One is the efficacy of Spirits of Turpentine in the bite of a rattle snake taken internally and applied externally to the wound. The other in the case of an injury sustained by a wound in the foot by nail and inflammation consequent thereon take lye that will bear an egg and immerse the wounded part in it as hot as it can be borne. Wind east. Weather pleasant.
1893 – Trinity Presbyterian Church was founded by the Reverend George Lester. It was founded as the Trinity Wesleyan Methodist Church. The ministers for the church came from the Bahamas but during the Depression this stopped and on May 12, 1931, the church changed to Trinity Presbyterian.
1904 – The Navy’s wireless telegraph was being built on the Naval Station by the DeForest Company.
1940 -The Fleet Sonar School was established at the Naval Station. This school would play an important part in training sonar operators to man the ships that defeated the German U-boats in World War II. After the war the school would train thousands of U.S. and allied Navies’ students until the early 1970’s. The school would also be visited by senior U.S. and foreign military officers.
1969 – In a ceremony at the Naval Air Station Key West, Lt. Colonel Eugene Flanagan relieved Lt. Colonel William Badaker as Commanding Officer of the Army’s 6th Battalion (HAWK), 65th Artillery.
1976 – First Federal Saving and Loan Association of the Florida Keys broke ground for their new $1,650,000 headquarters building on Kennedy Drive.
Information compiled by Tom Hambright, Historian Emeritus, Florida Keys History Center, Monroe County Public Library.
Image: President Harry Truman speaking to the graduation of the Fleet Sonar School on the Naval Station Key West on March 18, 1949. Jeff Brodhead Collection. Florida Keys History Center, Monroe County Public Library. https://www.flickr.com/photos/keyslibraries/7841142614