April 13 is National Peach Cobbler Day
Scrabble Day April 13 is the day Scrabble inventor Alfred Mosher Butts was born in 1899.
On April 13, 1742 George Frideric Handel’s oratorio, Messiah, made its world-premiere in Dublin, Ireland.
Birthday of Thomas Jefferson (1743), third president of the U.S.
From: Library of Congress: Description of a visit to Thomas Jefferson at Monticello in 1782,
from Travels in North-America, in the Years 1780-81-82 by the Marquis de Chastellux.
Let me describe to you a man, not yet forty, tall, and with a mild and pleasing countenance…. An American, who without ever having quitted his own country, is at once a musician, skilled in drawing, a geometrician, an astronomer, a natural philosopher, legislator, and statesman…. Sometimes natural philosophy, at others politics or the arts, were the topics of our conversation, for no object had escaped Mr. Jefferson; and it seemed as if from his youth he had placed his mind, as he has done his house, on an elevated situation, from which he might contemplate the universe.
1775 – Lord North extended the New England Restraining Act to South Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland. The act prohibited trade with any country other than Britain and Ireland.
The first elephant ever seen in the United States arrived from India on this day in 1796.
On April 13, 1829, the English Emancipation Act granted freedom of religion to Catholics.
1861 – American Civil War: Fort Sumter surrendered to Confederate forces.
Jefferson Memorial was dedicated in 1943
On April 13, 1970, an oxygen tank aboard Apollo 13 exploded, putting the crew in great danger and causing major damage to the spacecraft while en route to the Moon.