Celebrations Today – February 26
Holidays and observances
- Christian feast day:
- The first day of Ayyám-i-Há (Bahá’í Faith) (Please note that this observance is only locked into this date the Gregorian calendar on this date if Bahá’í Naw-Rúz takes place on March 21, which it doesn’t in all years)
- Day of Remembrance for Victims of Khojaly Massacre (Azerbaijan)
- Liberation Day (Kuwait)
- National Wear Red Day (United Kingdom, until 2016)
- Saviour’s Day (Nation of Islam)
Celebrations Today – USA: February 26
National Pistachio Day
National Tell a Fairy Tale Day
National Carnival Day
National Levi Strauss Day
National For Pete’s Sake Day
National Thermos Bottle Day
Today in US History: February 26
The mountain summits are all bare and rocky…I name it Isles des Monts Desert.Journal of Samuel Champlain, September 5, 1604.
Surf at Great Head, Mt. Desert Island, Maine, circa 1900.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920
Congress approved An Act to Establish the Lafayette National Park at Mt. Desert Island on the coast of Maine on February 26, 1919. The park, expanded and renamed Acadia National Park in 1929, was the first national park east of the Mississippi.
Claimed for a time by both France and England, Mt. Desert Island was the site of the first French mission in America, established by Jesuits in 1613. French explorer Samuel Champlain had visited the island in 1604, 16 years before the Pilgrims established a settlement at Plymouth. The British secured their claim to the island with their victory over the French at Quebec in 1759.
By the nineteenth century, farming, lumbering, fishing, and shipbuilding had developed into thriving industries on the island. In the mid-1800s, painters and journalists shared the scenic beauty of the island with outsiders, triggering a flood of well-heeled summer tourists, many of whom built lavish homes there in the 1880s and 1890s.
Along the Shore Path, Mt. Desert Island, Maine, circa 1900.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920
George B. Dorr, himself a member of this wealthy vacationing class, led the effort, begun in 1901, to conserve the landscape of Acadia. The Sieur de Monts National Monument was created by presidential proclamation in 1916 with 6,000 acres of land purchased and donated by Dorr and other private citizens intent upon preserving the region from lumbering and development interests. When the monument was designated a national park in 1919, Dorr became its first superintendent.
The Grand Canyon
Rust Camp, Grand Canyon, Arizona, circa 1909.
Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs, 1851-1991
Also on February 26, 1919, Congress passed An Act to Establish the Grand Canyon National Park in the State of Arizona. The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River in northwestern Arizona is one of the earth’s greatest natural wonders. Comprising over 1 million acres of northwestern Arizona, the park includes the most spectacular area of the 277-mile canyon cut by the Colorado River. Still inhabited by Native peoples with at least 2,000 years of history in the area, some of the tribes of Grand Canyon region are the Hopi, Navajo, Zuni, Paiute, Havasupai, and Hualapai.
The first bill to create Grand Canyon National Park was introduced in 1882, and again in 1883 and 1886 by Senator Benjamin Harrison. As president, Harrison established the Grand Canyon Forest Reserve in 1893. President Theodore Roosevelt created the Grand Canyon Game Preserve by proclamation in 1906 and Grand Canyon National Monument in 1908. Senate bills to establish a national park were introduced and defeated in 1910 and 1911; the Grand Canyon National Park Act was finally signed by President Woodrow Wilson in 1919. The National Park Service, established in 1916, assumed administration of the park.
Before the middle of the nineteenth century, very little was known about the geography of the Grand Canyon. Because of its remote location, the area in and around the canyon was not explored or mapped in detail by Europeans, although it was probably visited in 1540 by the Spanish expedition of Garcia Lopez de Cardenas, who searched with Vasques de Coronado for the seven legendary cities of Cibola. In 1776, two Spanish priests, Francisco Dominguez and Silvestre de Escalante, crossed the Colorado River while exploring the area, but little knowledge of the region was passed down in written form to later generations. The primary source of information about the magnificent canyon was an oral tradition sustained by the reports of fur trappers and traders and so-called “mountain men,” most of whom were escorted through the rugged terrain by Native American guides.
Only one early visitor, Warren Augustus Ferris, is known to have produced a map showing the Grand Canyon. Drawn in 1836, it was not published until 1940, too late to be of use to the geographers and explorers who first traveled to the Colorado River and the canyon during the late nineteenth century. Ferris did, however, write and publish several articles in the 1840s, one of which described the canyon. His account added to the available information about the existence and approximate location of the Grand Canyon and helped to increase interest in further exploration of the area.
The Library of Congress has rich resources on the Grand Canyon.
- For a vivid description of the Grand Canyon, read famed essayist Charles Dudley Warner’s account of his trip west in 1890. Warner’s report is one chapter of his book Our Italy, found in “California as I Saw It”: First-Person Narratives of California’s Early Years, 1849-1900.
- Mapping the National Parks documents the history, cultural aspects and geological formations of areas that eventually became the U.S. National Parks. A search on Grand Canyon will produce, among other items, a 1919 Rand McNally map of Grand Canyon National Park.
- Built in America: Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record, 1933-Present includes drawings and photographs of buildings in the Grand Canyon as well as of roads and walls leading to and from the canyon. Search on Grand Canyon to view images such as the Grand Canyon Railroad Terminal.
- Search on Grand Canyon in Touring Turn-of-the Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920. Explore with keywords such as Hopi to find Native American images such as that of a Hopi woman making pottery.
- Read about the Spanish exploration of the American southwest in Parallel Histories: Spain, the United States, and the American Frontier, a collaborative digital library project between the Library of Congress and the National Library of Spain.
·Visit American Memory collections on Native Americans. Search, for example, Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian: Photographic Images on keywords Hopi, Navajo, Zuni, Paiute, Havasupai, and Hualapai for images of peoples native to the Grand Canyon region. - Search the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog on Grand Canyon to view hundreds of images including buildings in the park, various park views, and more.
- To learn more about the movement to conserve and protect America’s natural heritage, see the chronology in The Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920. For additional resources concerning that material, view the introduction to the collection included in the Collection Connections section of the Teachers Page.
- Also, don’t miss the Today in History features on Yosemite and Mt. Rainier parks, and the establishment of the National Park Service in 1916.
Today in History – February 26-External Links
Today’s Weather in History
Today in Earthquake History
This Day in Naval History
Today’s Document from the National Archives
Today’s Events, Births & Deaths –Wikipedia
Today in History by AP
On this Day -1950 to 2005 – Today’s Story–BBC
On This Day: The New York Times
This Day in History –History.com
Today in Canadian History – Canada Channel
History of Britain that took place On This Day
Russia in History –Russiapedia