President Abraham Lincoln was a self-made man who studied and worked hard, he studied law and became a lawyer. Then later he went into politics. But he never was a career military officer.
They built new paved roads so that a greater number of dump trucks could remove the excavated earth. They sprayed insecticides to kill mosquitoes and built concrete locks to raise ships to a higher elevation.
It's debated; the credit is usually given to either Julia Ward Howe or Anna Jarvis. Howe was born first, so if you're looking for initial efforts, I would go with her.
