Vintage Voice: It Happened in March....

March 2, 1877: Rutherford B. Hayes is declared president by one vote the day before inauguration.

March 2, 1939: Massachusetts finally ratifies the Bill of Rights, 150 years after it's adoption.

March 3,1855: Congress appropriates $30,000 for a camel corps.

March 3, 1931: President Herbert Hoover signs a bill making The Star-Spangled Banner the national anthem.

March 4, 1789: Only 11 states are in attendance as the first Congress meets.  North Carolina and Rhode Island had not yet ratified the Constitution, so the Union included only 11 states when Congress convened for the first time.

March 5, 1963: Members of the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (SINA) picket the White House, demanding that Mrs. Kennedy put clothes on her horse. As it later turned out, SINA was a hoax, the brainchild of social satirist and professional put-on artist Alan Abel.

March 6, 1836: The Alamo falls.

March 6, 1854: Know-Nothings steal the papal stone from the Washington Monument. The "Know-Nothings"  political party was known nationally in the 1850s as the American Party. During the 1840s and 1850s they had become quite powerful politically. Basically, they were anti-foreigner and anti-Catholic and swore to support and vote for American-born Protestants only. A marble plaque, taken from the Temple of Concord in Rome, given by Pope Pius IX for the Washington Monument, (begun in 1848), was stolen and dumped into the Potomac River by the Know-Nothings. It was never recovered. Today 190 commemorative plaques can be viewed from the monument's interior staircase and among them is a replacement for the stolen plaque, sent by the Vatican in 1982.