The only son of Supreme Court Justice Robert Cooper Grier dies in the Miami steamboat disaster

William Potter Grier, the only son of 1813 Dickinson College graduate Supreme Court Justice Robert Cooper Grier and his wife, Isabelle, was a military doctor in the Regular Army being transported with his unit on the riverboat Miami when it exploded.  Sitting with a group of officers around a stove aboard the steamer, he and the others reportedly bore the brunt of the boiler explosion below decks and were never seen again.  William Grier was thirty-two years old.  (By John Osborne)

Source Citation

"Obituaries," The American Cyclopedia and Register of Important Events 0f the Year 1866 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1873), 556.

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