John C. Breckenridge was only 36 years old when he was sworn in as vice-president of the United States. To date, he is still the youngest person ever to hold that office. During the presidential campaign of 1860, Breckenridge was one of two candidates nominated by rival factions of the Democratic party. In the election, he finished third in the popular vote but second to Abraham Lincoln in the electoral college vote.
Breckenridge, CO is named for prospector Thomas Breckenridge. Yes they did change the middle ‘e’ to an ‘i’ in honor of John C. Breckinridge (note spelling) but changed it back to the current spelling when Breckinridge became a general in the CSA Army.
Former Vice President of the United States John C. Breckinridge rose to the rank of major general in the Confederate States Army, seeing action in the battles of Shiloh, Baton Rouge, Port Hudson and Murfreesboro, among others. He served as Secretary of War for the last few months of the Civil War, but recognized that the Confederacy had lost and encouraged President Jefferson Davis to surrender. When he learned that President Abraham Lincoln, his fellow Kentuckian, had been assassinated in April 1865, he was visibly distraught and said, “Gentlemen, the South has lost its best friend.”
He left the country but, after several years abroad, accepted a pardon from President Andrew Johnson in 1868 and returned to his law practice in Kentucky.
IIRC, Breckinridge and Judah P. Benjamin (Attorney General and also a Secretary of War in Jefferson’s Cabinet) were the only two Cabinet members who got out of the United States.
Benjamin, a very talented lawyer, decamped to England where he became a leading member of the bar, doing appellate work. He also wrote a textbook on the law of sale of goods, which many edition later is still one of the leading texts in the Commonwealth on the topic: Benjamin on Sale of Goods.
He appeared in several Canadian constitutional law cases in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, always arguing on behalf of provinces and against expansive interpretations of federal powers. The leopard can’t change its spots.
Civil engineer Theodore Judah was a key figure in establishing the first transcontinental railroad in 1869. He surveyed the railroad over the Sierra Nevada mountains. In all, 15 tunnels were blasted through the mountains. The high point through that pass, now called Donner Pass, is about 7,000’.
Herbert Hoover studied mining engineering at Stanford. He worked in mines in Australia and China before entering politics. He was among the first graduating class from Stanford.
While working for the USGS, Hoover was fined $60 for a mule dying. His investigation indicated the mule’s hind foot got caught in its halter while scratching his ear. The USGS said that was impossible and hence the fine. It is now known that mules do scratch their head with their hind foot and in fact Hoover himself witnessed an occurrence a few years later. Because of this he had a statue made up of a mule scratching his head and it sat on his desk while he was President.
Lou Henry Hoover, wife of Herbert, attended Stanford University. She studied geology. When she graduated she became the first woman to receive a degree in geology from Stanford.
Construction of the Hoover Dam began a year after the stock market collapse of 1929 and completed in 1935, ahead of schedule and under budget. 45,000 men applied for jobs during construction; less than 5,000 were hired. Congress approved naming the dam after President Herbert Hoover in 1931, but it was called “Boulder Dam” until 1947, when Harry Truman officially designated it as “Hoover Dam.”
In the song Highwayman by the country supergroup Highwaymen, Willy Nelson was the highwayman, Kris Kristofferson was the sailor, Waylon Jennings was the Boulder Dam worker and Johnny Cash was the starship captain.
Boulder Dam / Hoover Dam was built in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, on the state line dividing Nevada and Arizona. The dam is an arch-gravity dam, meaning that the water pressure pushes laterally against the arched dam and the ends of the arch are driven by that pressure into the solid rock on both sides of Black Canyon to anchor the dam laterally, while also the tremendous mass of the dam provides substantive vertical anchoring for it.
The Laguna Diversion Dam, completed in 1905, was the first dam built on the Colorado River. Just 43 feet tall, the dam was designed to divert water for irrigation in the Yuma Valley. It is located a few miles north of Yuma, Arizona. Since the creation of the Imperial Dam 5 miles upstream in 1948, the dam is no longer used for irrigation and now serves to regulate the outflows of the Imperial.
Over the past 30 years, more than 100 small dams have been removed in California. The San Clemente Dam was located about 14 miles southwest of Monterey, at coordinates ▲ 36.43586, -121.70877. It was built in 1921, but by November 2015 it had been removed.
Reasons for its removal include its being filled with sediment. The dam’s capacity was originally 1,425 acre-feet, but in over 75 years sediment filled in and reduced its capacity to only 70 acre-feet, or just 5% of original. Another reason was its proximity to an earthquake fault. Removing the dam also freed up 7 mi of the Carmel River for rainbow trout migration and also improved the habitat for the California red-legged frog, a near-threatened species found in California and northern Baja California.
Warren G. Harding, Republican of Ohio, was sworn in as President of the United States on March 4, 1921. He did not live to serve out his full four-year term. The circumstances of his death, most likely of cardiac arrest, are still somewhat disputed; his wife, First Lady Florence Harding, did not consent to an autopsy. He was buried in his hometown of Marion, Ohio, in a tomb inspired by a Greek temple.
Performer Al Jolson and actors Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford publicly supported Warren Harding in his presidential campaign.
As part of his tour of the west coast that culminated in his death, Harding was the first President to visit Canada and visit Alaska. It was clear while he was visiting Seattle that he was already quite ill. He would end up dying in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.
Vice-President Calvin Coolidge was the first veep to attend cabinet meetings, under the invitation of President Harding.
Someone bet Groucho Marx he couldn’t get President Coolidge to smile. When they were introduced, Groucho said, “Sorry, didn’t catch the name.” Coolidge grinned.
Although Coolidge was known to be a skilled and effective public speaker, in private he was a man of few words and was commonly referred to as “Silent Cal”. It is from this time that most of the jokes and anecdotes involving Coolidge originate, such as Coolidge being “silent in five languages”. An apocryphal story has it that a person seated next to him at a dinner said to him, “I made a bet today that I could get more than two words out of you.” He replied, “You lose.” However, on April 22, 1924, Coolidge himself said that the “You lose” quotation never occurred. The story about it was related by Frank B. Noyes, President of the Associated Press.
Alfred Noyes was prolific as a poet, short-story writer and playwright until his death in 1958 at age 77. His best-known poem, “The Highwayman”, was written in 1904, when he was 24. In 1995, “The Highwayman” was voted 15th in the BBC’s list of favorite British poems.