Before President James Polk went to bed on Dec. 28, 1846, he dipped his quill pen in ink and wrote in his diary: “Nothing of much interest occurred today.”
Arabella Belle Babb Mansfield, the first woman admitted to practice law in the United States, was born on a farm near Burlington in 1846. When she grew up, she graduated as valedictorian from Iowa Wesleyan College in 1866.