Benjamin Harrison

23rd President of the United States (1889–1893), a former US Senator from Indiana and Union Army brigadier general. His First Annual Message to Congress (December 3, 1889) is the primary document behind this vault's central finding on the 1890–91 transfer of the weather service from the Army Signal Corps to a new civilian Weather Bureau in the Department of Agriculture (claim-1890-91-weather-service-transferred-to-agriculture-at-harrisons-request): read directly, it names the reason as ordinary bureaucratic reorganization — the Signal Corps' military-side work "deteriorating" — rather than the Howgate embezzlement scandal or the deadly January 1888 Plains blizzard sometimes cited in secondary institutional histories (claim-harrison-1889-message-cites-corps-deterioration-not-howgate-or-blizzard).

first_seen is backdated to 2026-07-11, when the vault first quoted him as the transfer's requester via the NWS timeline note; this page was built 2026-09-11, once a second capture read his own words directly and made him a load-bearing primary-document author rather than just a named requester.

References

• claim-1890-91-weather-service-transferred-to-agriculture-at-harrisons-request
• claim-harrison-1889-message-cites-corps-deterioration-not-howgate-or-blizzard