The steamboat Isaac Newton left the Cortlandt Street dock in New York City at six p.m., bound for Albany with around a hundred passengers aboard.  Soon after, she exploded a boiler and the entire vessel took fire.  Passing vessels took off most of the passengers but half a dozen crewmen were killed outright and around fifteen other passengers and crew badly scalded or burned. A total of twelve people eventually died.   (By John Osborne) 

The 1000-ton French steamship Charles Martell had left New York just two days before, bound for Marseilles.  In heavy weather, she took on water and in the early afternoon she was abandoned. Luckily, the French vessel had encountered the New Bedford ship St. George, bound for Buenos Aires, shortly before.  The St. George took off the crew and passengers, thirty people, and made a stop in Bermuda to put them ashore.  (By John Osborne)

Sir William Armstrong tested for the first time his new 600 pounder cannon on the English coast at Shoeburyness.  The twenty-two ton weapon was designed to fire a 13.2 inch shell over a distance of  six miles. During the test, the range was set at around 4000 yards and the giant cannon, served by twenty men, performed well, firing both shot and shell.  (By John Osborne)

In the early hours of the morning, fire burst through the skylight of a steel-wire factory on Seventh Avenue in New York City.  Within hours the entire city block between Twenty-Eighth and Twenty-Ninth Streets was largely destroyed and some structures on either side of the block badly damaged. Damage was estimated at more than $160,000 and forty families were said to be made homeless but no serious injuries were reported.  (By John Osborne)  

At three in the afternoon, outside the city of Omaha, a large celebration was held at the ground-breaking of the Union Pacific Railroad's construction on the western side of the Missouri River.  Nebraska's Territorial Governor Alvin Saunders led the dignitaries as they ceremonially wielded shovels before around a thousand people, largely from Omaha and Council Bluffs, Iowa.  Festive events went on in Omaha that evening.  (By John Osborne) 

Jane Pierce, the wife of former president Franklin Pierce, died in the morning hours at Andover, Massachusetts.  She had suffered from tuberculosis for some time as well as serious depression following the death of her only surviving son Benjamin in a train crash in 1853.  She was buried in Concord, New Hampshire.  She was fifty-seven years old.  (By John Osborne)   

In Albany, New York, Charles Phillips, described in the press as "a well known character about town" was first wounded in the arm by a Thomas Creegan and then later shot again, this time by a friend of Cregan's named Matthew Brummaghin and through the heart at the the Delavan House Hotel.  He had reportedly spat in Brummaghin's face and was instantly fired on and killed.  He was forty-seven years old.  (By John Osborne)