The Cross Florida Canal began during the Great Depression as one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's projects to revive the nation's ailing economy. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers oversaw about 6,000 WPA workers, mostly doing manual labor, and these four bridge stanchions were begun before work stopped prior to completion of the stanchions and bridge. The entire canal project was halted without public explanation, though it is thought that growing environmental concerns outweighed Roosevelt's willingness to spend more money on a project that might harm the environment and risk his 1936 re-election. After President John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, Texas, in 1963, President Lyndon Baines Johnson revived the project as part of his Great Society era and came to Florida for a rainy ceremony to ignite a symbolic dynamite charge marking a new beginning. The Corps of Engineers used a reduced plan created in the early 1940s only for barges, but construction stopped again in 1971 after about one-third of the work had been completed, halted through a combination of federal court legal action, citizen efforts, legal action, and President Nixon's Executive Order. In 1998, the land once intended for the Cross Florida Ship and Barge Canal officially became the Marjorie Harris Carr Cross Florida Greenway, a mile-wide, 110-mile-long park enjoyed annually by millions of visitors.