On this day 250 years ago at his headquarters on Manhattan (the Morris-Jumel Mansion), Gen. George Washington assigned Jean Louis Imbert, a recently-arrived officer from France who had volunteered for the Continental Army, to report to the New York Highlands and to construct fortifications against British invasion. Imbert was better qualified as a mapmaker and surveyor rather than as an engineer, but the Continental Army and the Continental Congress failed to make use of his skills and he returned to France in ill health the next year.

Source: “George Washington to the New York Convention, 17 October 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-06-02-0444. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 6, 13 August 1776 – 20 October 1776, ed. Philander D. Chase and Frank E. Grizzard, Jr. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994, pp. 586–587.]