February 26 · This Day in America
President Woodrow Wilson signs the act, and a mile-deep chasm of red rock and time — 277 river-miles of it, carved by a single patient river — passes into the keeping of the American people forever. It nearly didn't. Park bills had failed in 1910 and 1911; for years prospectors filed mining claims on the rim and entrepreneurs charged tolls on the trails. Theodore Roosevelt, standing on that edge in 1903, had pleaded: leave it as it is, you cannot improve on it. Sixteen years later the country finally agreed. There is no monument here that anyone built. The Colorado did the work, two billion years of stone laid bare, and on this day a young nation decided that some things are worth more held in common than sold off in pieces. You can stand on the South Rim today and see exactly what they chose to save.
Source: www.loc.gov
Also on this day · 1993
At 12:17 p.m., a 1,300-pound bomb detonates in the parking garage under the North Tower, blasting a crater several stories deep. The plan is to topple one tower into the other. The towers hold. Six people are killed and more than a thousand hurt; some 50,000 are evacuated through smoke and dark stairwells. A vehicle part with a stamped serial number cracks the case. It is a warning the country would understand fully only eight years later.
Source: www.fbi.gov
“Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it; not a bit. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.”Theodore Roosevelt at the Grand Canyon, 1903