Finding the unexpected in the everyday.
Mary Golda Ross was the first known Native American female engineer. She was born in the Oklahoma community of Park Hill in 1908. One of her great-grandfathers was John Ross, a longtime and widely renowned chief of the Cherokee Nation who helped guide his people through such tumultuous experiences as the Civil War and the... Continue Reading →
November 19, 1993 At Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania, then-Federal Highway Administrator (and later U.S. Transportation Secretary) Rodney Slater played the key role in a ceremony honoring somebody who had distinguished himself both as a war hero and important good-roads advocate. Roy Stone had served in the Union Army during the Civil War and,... Continue Reading →
The Wampanoag people were a long-established confederacy of several Native American tribes in present-day Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Many of the Wampanoag people are now enrolled in two federally recognized tribes in Massachusetts: the Mashpee Wampanoag Indian Tribal Council, based in the town of Mashpee on the southeastern coast of mainland Massachusetts; and the Wampanoag... Continue Reading →
November 16, 1920 Arrival at Longreach of the Armstrong Whitworth FK8 with the first bag of air mail on the inaugural flight of the first Qantas air service from Charleville to Cloncurry, 22 November 1922 The longtime airline Quantas was established as Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Limited at the Gresham Hotel in the... Continue Reading →
November 15, 1928 The first commercial use of a rail detector car in the United States took place. Since the advent of the train, a key challenge had been to avert service failures and dangerous derailments along the tracks carrying that mode of transportation. Inventor and entrepreneur Elmer A. Sperry, in response to this challenge, started to... Continue Reading →
Mary Riddle won widespread acclaim as one of the first Native American women to earn an airplane pilot’s license. She was born in the community of Bruceport in Washington in 1902. A lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest, Riddle was a member of both the Quinault Indian Nation in Washington and the Clatsop Tribe in... Continue Reading →
November 14, 1877 Ralph H. Carpenter, who launched and led one of the largest manufacturers of school bus bodies in the United States, was born in southern Indiana. As a teenager, Carpenter set up his own blacksmith shop in the city of Mitchell in the Hoosier State. A significant part of Carpenter’s job as a... Continue Reading →
November 13, 1927 The Holland Tunnel was opened to traffic in the New York metropolitan area just one minute after midnight. This highway conduit, which runs beneath the Hudson River and connects New York City’s island of Manhattan with Jersey City, New Jersey, was the first twin-tube underwater vehicular tunnel in the United States. The tunnel... Continue Reading →
In 1966, Donald Winchester became the first known Native American graduate of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy (USCGA) in New London, Connecticut. (Janet Emerson, USCGA’s class of 1988, was the first known female Native American to graduate from that institution.) Of Cherokee descent, Winchester was also the Coast Guard’s first known Native American aviator. Winchester... Continue Reading →
November 9, 1895 The last horse-drawn streetcar in Detroit made its final run. Banners on each side of the vehicle read “The last horse car.” Two horses pulled it along the Chene Street line, which was the last of Detroit’s streetcar routes to be equipped with electric streetcars. “Detroit takes final leave of the horse... Continue Reading →
Transportation History 