From the Lawrence Daily Journal-World for Oct. 10, 1913:

• “Prizes for boy and girl gardeners have been awarded by the Civic League. A total of twenty-one dollars in cash prizes were given away by the committee this year, the awards being announced today. The season was not a favorable one but in spite of this the committee of judges found some splendid gardens and lawns about the city which had received the careful attention of the juvenile gardeners. There was much enthusiasm shown, a total of sixty gardens having been entered in the contest. Forty of these were in North Lawrence and twenty on the south side.”
• “During the storm last night a hay barn belonging to W. E. Perkins of the Kaw Valley was struck by lightning and set afire. The loss was complete. Mr. Perkins estimates that he had about $350 worth of hay in the barn and the structure cost him another $350 making the total loss $700. There was no insurance on either the barn or its contents.”
• “Fire that destroyed the six-story plant of the Southwestern Mill company of Kansas City, Kan., burned up to 25,000 bushels of wheat and 1500 barrels of flour and caused a loss estimated at $600,000. Ten men who were at work on the top floor when the fire started and who at first were believed to have perished, were found to have escaped when the list of employees was checked up. The cause of the fire is unknown. The mill officials said the rebuilding would begin at once.”
• “At exactly two o’clock this afternoon President Wilson pressed a button that blew up the Gamboa dike. The electric spark originating when the president pressed a button in the White House sped more than four thousand miles and exploded the charges of dynamite which practically removed the last obstruction in the Panama Canal. Electrical experts calculated that within four seconds after the president pressed the button the current passed through the small switch on the apparatus in Gamboa dike, this switch setting in motion the other apparatus which furnished the current for exploding the charges. The Atlantic and Pacific were not actually united today when the Gamboa dike was destroyed and the waters of Gatun Lake allowed to flow into the Culebra cut, since the lake and cut are normally eighty feet above the level of the sea. The destruction of the dike, however, removes the last obstruction to navigation of the greater part of the canal by lighter draft vessels, and opens up direct connection between the great Gatun Lake, which already is practically ready to discharge vessels into the Atlantic through the Gatun locks, and the Pacific division.”