October 26 · This Day in America
They called it Clinton's Ditch, and they laughed. Three hundred sixty-three miles of hand-dug channel across the wilderness of New York, joining Lake Erie to the Hudson and the Atlantic beyond. On this morning Governor DeWitt Clinton boards the packet boat Seneca Chief at Buffalo with two kegs of Great Lakes water aboard, and a chain of cannon fires the news east, gun to gun, all the way to New York City and back in eighty-one minutes. Days later Clinton pours Lake Erie into the sea — the "Wedding of the Waters." Overnight, the cost of moving a ton of freight across the state collapses by ninety percent. The interior of America is suddenly reachable, and it begins to fill. New York becomes the Empire State because of a ditch nobody believed in. The country had just learned it could build its own future with shovels.
Source: www.loc.gov
Also on this day · 1776
Washington's army is losing. The Revolution may not survive the winter. So Congress sends its most famous mind across an ocean patrolled by the Royal Navy. At seventy, Benjamin Franklin boards the sloop Reprisal with two young grandsons and a desperate mission: charm France into the war. He will succeed. The alliance he wins at Versailles becomes the difference between a footnote and a nation.
Source: www.history.com