March 11 · This Day in America
It begins as rain. Then the temperature falls off a cliff, the wind turns to a scream, and the rain becomes snow that does not stop for two days. The Blizzard of 1888 pins the Northeast under drifts as tall as houses — fifty inches in places, gusts near eighty miles an hour, New York City silenced and white and impassable. Trains freeze on their tracks with passengers inside. People who set out for work a hundred yards away are found later, lost in their own neighborhoods. More than four hundred die. But the storm teaches the country something it does not forget: a city's lifelines cannot hang in the open air. In the years after, New York begins burying its telegraph wires and dreaming of trains that run beneath the snow. The subway is, in part, a memory of this storm.
Source: www.history.com
Also on this day · 1779
In the middle of a revolution it is not winning, the Continental Congress establishes a corps of engineers to build the forts, bridges, and defenses an army needs to survive. Their work shows up at Bunker Hill, Saratoga, and Yorktown. Two centuries later the same Corps has dammed rivers, dug harbors, and reshaped the map of the country — a wartime improvisation that never stopped building.
Source: www.history.com