The horror of the Civil War was still three years away when the then village of Lapeer organized its first police and fire protection, but it was still tense times. Less than 20 years earlier, county residents fretted about Indian attacks. Elsewhere in the world in 1858:
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The Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to St. Bernadette of Lourdes on Feb. 11;
Hyman L. Lipman patents the eraser tipped pencil March 30;
Minnesota became the nation's 32nd state on May 11;
Abraham Lincoln first utters the words, "A house divided against itself cannot stand" on March 30;
Papers by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace announcing the theory of evolution were read July 11; at London's Linnean Society. Darwin went on to be famous, Wallace not so much;
Japan and the U.S. sign the Harris treaty July 29, which opened five Japanese ports to U.S. ships;
The first mailboxes are installed Aug. 2 on streets in Boston and New York;
Macy's Department store opens Oct. 28 in New York City;
Digging in a New Jersey marl pit in October, William Foulke discovers the nearly complete skeleton of a pre-historic animal. It is eventually named Hadrosaurus foulki, in honor of its discoverer and the nearby town of Haddonfield, NJ.
