National Railroad Jubilee is held.

The three-day event celebrates the beginning of railroad service between Boston, Montreal, the St. Lawrence River, and the Great Lakes. Some 3,600 people, including President Millard Fillmore and Lord Elgin, the governor general of British North America, attend a dinner on Boston Common on September 19, 1851. The event is also attended by Secretary of State Daniel Webster, who a few years earlier had written, “The rich take the train because it is quicker, the poor because it is cheaper . . . in the history of human inventions there is hardly one so well calculated as that of railroads to equalize the condition of men . . .men are thus brought together as neighbors and acquaintances, who lived two hundred miles apart.”