SCENIC · PARKS TRACKER
1,058 destinations · National Parks, Monuments, Forests & more
In Quincy, Massachusetts, this park preserves the homes of four generations of the Adams family, including the birthplaces of Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, the "Old House" Peacefield where the family lived for 140 years, and the Stone Library built by Charles Francis Adams to house 14,000 volumes. No other single site in the country preserves the homes of two presidents from the same family.
September 17, 1862 remains the bloodiest single day in American military history, with nearly 23,000 soldiers killed, wounded, or missing as Lee's Army of Northern Virginia clashed with McClellan's Army of the Potomac along Antietam Creek. The Union's narrow strategic victory gave Lincoln the political opening to issue the Emancipation Proclamation five days later, transforming the war's purpose.
In the parlor of Wilmer McLean's farmhouse on April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending the Civil War after four years and 620,000 deaths. The reconstructed village of Appomattox Court House, including the McLean House, courthouse, and tavern, preserves the setting of the war's defining moment.
This Greek Revival mansion was the antebellum home of Robert E. Lee and Mary Anna Custis Lee, commanding a bluff above the Potomac with sweeping views of Washington DC. When Lee resigned his Union commission in 1861, the federal government seized the estate and established a freedmen's village on the grounds; Arlington National Cemetery grew up around the house during and after the Civil War.
The 729,000-acre Big Cypress Swamp — named not for the size of its trees but for the breadth of the watershed — stretches north of Everglades National Park and provides the freshwater sheet flow that sustains the Everglades ecosystem. The preserve is the last stronghold of the endangered Florida panther and supports a unique swamp buggy culture; half the water supply for South Florida's 7 million residents originates here.
Called the "biological crossroads of North America," Big Thicket is where Eastern deciduous forests, Gulf coastal prairies, Southwestern deserts, and Southern pine forests converge, creating extraordinary biodiversity — over 1,000 plant species, 300 bird species, and four carnivorous plant species including the pitcher plant and sundew. The preserve protects a dozen separate units of the thicket that once covered 3 million acres and has been reduced to a fraction of its former extent.
This tobacco farm in Franklin County, Virginia was where Booker T. Washington was born into slavery in 1856 and spent the first nine years of his life before emancipation; he went on to found Tuskegee University and become the most influential Black leader in America in the late 19th century. Reconstructed plantation structures — the cabin where he was born, the kitchen, and the smokehouse — along with an interpretive trail tell the story of enslaved life on a small Virginia farm.
Beacon Hill's Black Heritage Trail links fifteen pre-Civil War sites that document Boston's free Black community, including the African Meeting House — the oldest surviving Black church building in the United States, built in 1806 and used as a community center, school, and abolitionist gathering place. The trail also passes the Phillips School, one of the nation's first integrated schools, and the homes of prominent abolitionists and community leaders.
The Freedom Trail connects sixteen historic sites spread across downtown Boston: the Old South Meeting House where the Boston Tea Party was organized, Faneuil Hall, Paul Revere's House, the USS Constitution — the world's oldest commissioned naval vessel still afloat — and the Bunker Hill Monument commemorating the 1775 battle where Colonial forces proved they could stand against British Regulars. The park is unusual in that most of its units are urban buildings rather than open landscape.
The poet and Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg spent the last 22 years of his life at Connemara, a 264-acre mountain farm outside Flat Rock in the Blue Ridge foothills, where he completed his Pulitzer Prize-winning Complete Poems and his wife Lilian raised a nationally renowned herd of dairy goats. The farmhouse, barns, and goat pens are preserved as the family left them, with descendants of the original Chikaming goat herd still on the grounds.
Between 850 and 1150 CE, Ancestral Puebloan people constructed an extraordinary complex of multi-story great houses in remote Chaco Canyon, including Pueblo Bonito with its 650 rooms and 40 kivas arranged in a precise D-shape — the largest building in North America for 600 years. Astronomical alignments built into the structures and a road system radiating hundreds of miles across the desert suggest Chaco was a major ceremonial and political center.
The oldest and largest military park in the United States, established just 27 years after the battles, preserves the ground where the second-bloodiest engagement of the Civil War was fought along the Chickamauga Creek — whose Cherokee name means "River of Death" — in September 1863. The subsequent Union victories on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge broke the Confederate grip on Chattanooga and opened the road to Atlanta.
Granite spires and domes rising 60 stories from a high desert basin in southern Idaho created a landmark that California Trail emigrants called the "City of Rocks" in the 1840s and 1850s; at Register Rock, they inscribed their names in axle grease on the stone, and some of those signatures survive today. The reserve is now also a premier technical rock climbing destination, with over 600 established routes on the otherworldly granite formations.
The 38-room home in Glen Echo, Maryland that Clara Barton built in 1891 and occupied until her death in 1912 served simultaneously as her personal residence and as the national headquarters of the American Red Cross she had founded a decade earlier. The rambling structure, with its built-in storage closets that doubled as supply rooms for disaster relief, reflects the remarkable way Barton fused her private life with her humanitarian mission.
This sprawling park links two pivotal chapters of American history: Jamestown Island, site of the first permanent English settlement in 1607, and the Yorktown Battlefield, where Cornwallis's surrender on October 19, 1781 ended the Revolutionary War. The 23-mile Colonial Parkway connects these sites with Colonial Williamsburg through a tidewater landscape little changed from the colonial era.
On January 17, 1781, General Daniel Morgan executed a brilliant double-envelopment of Banastre Tarleton's elite British Legion at a backcountry cattle pasture, destroying over 80 percent of the force in one of the most tactically perfect battles of the Revolution. The stunning American victory at the Cowpens rejuvenated Patriot morale across the Southern Campaign and set Cornwallis on the road toward Yorktown.
Craters of the Moon preserves 618 square miles of lava flows, cinder cones, spatter cones, and lava tube caves across the Snake River Plain — terrain so alien that NASA brought Apollo astronauts here to train for lunar geology before the 1969 moon landing. The most recent eruptions occurred just 2,000 years ago and geologists expect another eruptive episode within the next 1,000 years, making this one of the youngest volcanic landscapes in the contiguous United States.
The natural break in the Appalachian Mountain wall at Cumberland Gap was the gateway through which Daniel Boone blazed the Wilderness Road in 1775 and through which some 300,000 settlers flooded into Kentucky and the Ohio Valley over the following decades. The park's 24,000 acres span three states and include over 800 catalogued cave systems, 70 miles of hiking trails, and the historic Tri-State Peak.
At Tampa Bay's shore, this memorial marks the approximate landing site where Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto came ashore in May 1539 with 600 soldiers, beginning a four-year expedition that made him the first European to cross the Mississippi River. The park interprets the profound and often violent encounter between de Soto's force and the Native peoples of the Southeast.
The preserve lands surrounding Denali National Park permit sport hunting and subsistence activities not allowed within the park itself, while sharing the same spectacular Alaska Range landscape dominated by Denali — at 20,310 feet the highest peak in North America. The preserve's boreal forests, braided glacial rivers, and tundra ridgelines support wolves, caribou, grizzly bears, and Dall sheep in one of the continent's great intact wilderness ecosystems.
The Philadelphia row house where Poe lived from 1838 to 1844 — the longest period he spent in any city — was the creative peak of his career, during which he wrote "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Black Cat," "The Gold Bug," and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," inventing the detective story genre. The modest brick house, the only surviving Philadelphia home of the writer, includes a dark basement that Poe scholars believe may have inspired the story of Montresor and Fortunato.
The only home Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower ever owned together sits on 189 acres adjacent to the Gettysburg battlefield, purchased in 1950 and used as a weekend retreat during Ike's presidency before becoming their retirement home in 1961. World leaders from Churchill to Khrushchev visited the farm, and the house is preserved as the Eisenhowers left it, with Mamie's famous "pink palace" décor intact.
This imposing Greek Revival building on Wall Street occupies the site of the original Federal Hall, where George Washington took the oath of office as the first President of the United States on April 30, 1789, and where the First Congress drafted the Bill of Rights. The current structure, built as the US Custom House in 1842, now houses a museum of constitutional history.
On the night of April 14, 1865 — five days after Lee's surrender — John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln in the presidential box at Ford's Theatre on 10th Street NW; Lincoln was carried across the street to the Petersen House, where he died the next morning. The fully restored theater still presents live performances, and the museum in its basement holds the derringer Booth used and the coat Lincoln wore that night.
When British warships bombarded Baltimore's star-shaped harbor fort for 25 hours on September 13–14, 1814, the fort held — and the sight of the garrison's enormous flag still flying at dawn inspired prisoner Francis Scott Key to write the poem that became "The Star-Spangled Banner." The fort's unique dual designation as both a national monument and historic shrine reflects its singular status in American patriotic memory.
Confederate artillery opened fire on the Union garrison holding Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, beginning the Civil War; the fort surrendered after 34 hours of bombardment without a single combat death. Fort Moultrie on Sullivan's Island, accessible by ferry, tells the story of American coastal defense from the Revolution through World War II.
Cedar Hill, the 21-room Victorian home in Anacostia where Frederick Douglass lived from 1877 until his death in 1895, commands sweeping views across the Anacostia River toward the Capitol — a vista that Douglass, born into slavery in Maryland, deeply treasured. The house has been preserved largely as Douglass left it, including his study where he wrote and received dignitaries from around the world.
Four of the Civil War's most brutal battles — Fredericksburg (1862), Chancellorsville (1863, where Stonewall Jackson was mortally wounded by his own men), the Wilderness (1864), and Spotsylvania Court House (1864) — were fought in this central Virginia corridor, producing more than 100,000 total casualties. The park's 8,374 acres across multiple units preserve some of the best surviving Civil War earthworks in the country.
The northernmost unit in the National Park System lies entirely above the Arctic Circle and encompasses the central Brooks Range — 8.5 million acres with no roads, no trails, and no visitor facilities, reached only by small aircraft from Fairbanks or Coldfoot. Named by explorer Robert Marshall in 1929 for two peaks he saw as the "Gates to the Arctic," the preserve is one of the most remote places on Earth, with an average of fewer than 11,000 visitors per year.
The largest mausoleum in North America, popularly known as "Grant's Tomb," entombs Ulysses S. Grant and his wife Julia Dent Grant in matching black Brazilian granite sarcophagi beneath a 150-foot granite dome in Riverside Park. More than 90,000 citizens contributed over $600,000 to build the monument, which was dedicated before 1 million people in 1897.
The three-day Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863 produced more than 50,000 casualties and marked the last major Confederate offensive into the North, representing the turning point of the Civil War. Lincoln dedicated the Soldiers' National Cemetery here on November 19 with a 272-word address that redefined the war's meaning; more than 1,300 monuments now dot the 6,000-acre battlefield.
Built in 1700 by Swedish Lutheran settlers on the Delaware River waterfront, Gloria Dei is Philadelphia's oldest surviving church and one of the oldest in the United States, with an active congregation that has worshipped continuously for over 320 years. The church preserves Swedish colonial artifacts including a cradle and chest brought from Sweden in the 17th century, as well as the grave of Nils Collin, the church's 18th-century pastor.
At Promontory Summit on May 10, 1869, workers for the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads drove the ceremonial last spikes connecting the nation's first transcontinental railroad — a 1,776-mile line that cut travel from New York to San Francisco from six months to six days. Working replica locomotives meet nose-to-nose as they did in 1869, and the original grade and cuts of both railroads remain visible across the high Utah desert.
General Nathanael Greene's Patriot army fought Lord Cornwallis to a tactical defeat on March 15, 1781, but so devastated the British force that Cornwallis abandoned the Carolinas and marched north to his eventual surrender at Yorktown. Established in 1917 as the first national military park in the South, the 220-acre battlefield is dotted with monuments including one to the only US president born in North Carolina, James K. Polk.
The Grange was Alexander Hamilton's only personal home, a Federal-style country house he commissioned in 1802 on his 32-acre Manhattan estate, where he lived for only two years before his fatal duel with Aaron Burr in 1804. The house has been relocated twice — first in 1889 and again in 2008 — and now stands in St. Nicholas Park, restored to its 1802 appearance.
The tidal marshes and farm fields of Maryland's Eastern Shore were both Harriet Tubman's birthplace and the landscape she navigated to escape slavery in 1849, then repeatedly returned to as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, leading at least 70 enslaved people to freedom. The park encompasses her birthplace area, the Brodess Farm where she was held, and the wetland corridors she used to evade pursuit.
Springwood, the Hyde Park estate where FDR was born in 1882 and lived his entire life, overlooks the Hudson River from a wooded bluff; Roosevelt is buried in the rose garden alongside Eleanor, who is commemorated at her Val-Kill cottage nearby — the only national historic site dedicated to a first lady. The estate also houses the first presidential library, which Roosevelt himself designed and dedicated in 1941.
Hopewell Furnace is one of America's most complete remaining examples of an early iron plantation — a self-sufficient community built around a charcoal-fired iron furnace that operated from 1771 to 1883, producing stoves, hollowware, and munitions for the Revolution. The ironmaster's mansion, workers' cottages, charcoal hearths, and the furnace stack itself survive in the rolling Pennsylvania countryside.
Philadelphia's Independence Hall is where delegates signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and drafted the Constitution in 1787; the Liberty Bell, cracked in the 1840s and now housed in its own pavilion, became the most enduring symbol of American freedom. The park's 55 acres of old city Philadelphia include Carpenter's Hall, Congress Hall, and the President's House site where Washington and Adams lived while the city was the nation's capital.
A circular neoclassical rotunda of white marble sits on the Tidal Basin, its interior dome inscribed with excerpts from the Declaration of Independence and Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia. Rudolph Evans's 19-foot bronze Jefferson stands at the center, and the surrounding cherry trees bloom spectacularly each spring.
The small south Georgia town of Plains preserves the world Jimmy Carter grew up in: his boyhood farmhouse at Archery where the family farmed without electricity or running water, the Plains High School where he and Rosalynn attended classes, the Carter family peanut warehouse, and the Plains Depot that served as his 1976 campaign headquarters. Carter was born, raised, and still lives in Plains, making it unique among presidential historic sites.
General Johnston's Confederate army mounted a fierce defense of Kennesaw Mountain against Sherman's advancing forces in June 1864 during the Atlanta Campaign, inflicting heavy casualties in one of Sherman's rare frontal assaults. The 2,965-acre park preserves miles of earthworks along the mountain's slopes, and the summit offers panoramic views stretching toward Atlanta.
On October 7, 1780, frontier riflemen from the Appalachian backcountry surrounded and annihilated a force of over 1,000 Loyalist provincials on a rocky ridgeline, killing their commander Major Patrick Ferguson — the only British officer on the field. Thomas Jefferson called it the turning point of the Revolution; the victory revived the Southern Patriot cause after devastating defeats at Camden and Charleston.
Nineteen stainless steel soldiers in full combat gear advance through juniper ground cover on the National Mall, their haunted expressions reflected in a black granite mural wall etched with 2,500 photographic images of support troops. The adjacent Pool of Remembrance is inscribed with the total casualties: 54,246 dead and 8,177 missing.
The only home Abraham Lincoln ever owned — a Greek Revival house in Springfield, Illinois where he and Mary Todd Lincoln lived from 1844 until departing for Washington in 1861 — is the centerpiece of a four-block historic neighborhood restored to its 1860 appearance. It was from the front steps of this house that Lincoln addressed his Springfield neighbors for the last time before leaving for his inauguration.
Daniel Chester French's 19-foot seated marble Lincoln gazes down the National Mall, flanked by 36 Doric columns representing the states at the time of his death. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech from its steps during the 1963 March on Washington.
Lowell was America's first planned industrial city, built in the 1820s around a remarkable system of canals that harnessed the Merrimack River to power massive textile mills staffed largely by young farm women from across New England. The preserved mill buildings, canal system, boardinghouses, and working turbines tell the story of the Industrial Revolution's human and technological dimensions.
The Richmond home of Maggie Lena Walker, the daughter of a formerly enslaved woman who became the first woman in American history to found and serve as president of a chartered bank, the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, in 1903. Walker was also a prominent civil rights leader and newspaper editor in the Jim Crow South, building Black economic power through her fraternal organization, the Independent Order of St. Luke.
Two major battles were fought on these rolling Virginia fields just 25 miles from Washington: First Bull Run in July 1861, the Confederacy's first major victory that dispelled Northern illusions of a short war, and Second Bull Run in August 1862, where Lee's decisive defeat of Pope's Army of Virginia set the stage for the invasion that ended at Antietam. The Henry Hill visitor center overlooks the ground where Stonewall Jackson earned his famous sobriquet.
Auburn Avenue in Atlanta's Sweet Auburn neighborhood is the birthplace and spiritual home of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — his two-story Victorian birth home at 501 Auburn Avenue, the Ebenezer Baptist Church where he and his father preached, and the King Center where he and Coretta Scott King are entombed. The surrounding neighborhood interprets the rich African American community that nurtured the civil rights movement.
The "shot heard round the world" was fired on April 19, 1775 when colonial militiamen confronted British Regulars at Concord's North Bridge, then harassed their retreat back to Boston along what is now Battle Road. The park preserves the North Bridge, the site of Paul Revere's capture, Hartwell Tavern, and the landscape of the first armed conflict of the American Revolution.
Between Joshua Tree and Death Valley in the eastern Mojave Desert, this 1.5-million-acre preserve encompasses Kelso Dunes — which rise 700 feet and boom with subsonic sound when sand cascades down their faces — and Cima Dome, home to the world's densest natural Joshua tree forest. Hole-in-the-Wall contains remarkable petroglyphs and a dramatic maze of rhyolite rock formations; the Kelso Depot, a restored 1924 Spanish Colonial Revival railroad station, serves as the visitor center.
On February 27, 1776 — just five months before the Declaration of Independence — Patriot militiamen routed a force of Loyalist Scots Highlanders at the Moores Creek bridge, killing or capturing nearly the entire force in three minutes of fighting. This decisive early Patriot victory discouraged British plans for a Southern campaign and helped persuade North Carolina to vote for independence.
Four presidents — Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln — are carved 60 feet tall into Black Hills granite at 5,725-foot elevation, a project executed by sculptor Gutzon Borglum from 1927 to 1941. The site sits on land sacred to the Lakota people, whose 1868 treaty rights were violated when gold was discovered in the Hills.
Natchez preserves the contradictions of antebellum Mississippi: grand plantation mansions like Melrose built on enslaved labor, the remarkable diary of William Johnson — a free Black barber who documented Natchez life from 1835 to 1851 — and the Forks of the Road site, once the second-largest domestic slave market in the country. The park interprets the full complexity of life in a wealthy slave-trading city.
In the mid-19th century New Bedford was the wealthiest city per capita in the United States, its fortunes built on whale oil that lit the lamps of the world; Herman Melville shipped out from this port in 1841 and drew on the experience for Moby-Dick. The park preserves six blocks of cobblestone streets, granite counting houses, and chandleries that formed the commercial heart of the global whaling industry.
A 352-foot pink granite Doric column rises from South Bass Island in Lake Erie to commemorate Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry's decisive victory over the British fleet on September 10, 1813 — a battle that secured American control of the Great Lakes. The memorial also celebrates nearly two centuries of peace among the US, Canada, and Great Britain along the border.
Grant's nine-month siege of Petersburg from June 1864 to April 1865 anticipated the trench warfare of World War I, with both armies entrenched in elaborate earthwork systems stretching 37 miles around the city that protected Richmond's supply lines. The Battle of the Crater — in which Union soldiers tunneled beneath Confederate lines and detonated four tons of gunpowder — was one of the most dramatic and disastrous episodes of the entire war.
Kamehameha the Great constructed this massive war temple on the Kohala Coast of the Big Island in 1791 after a prophet told him he would unite all the Hawaiian Islands if he built a heiau for his war god Kukailimoku — and within twelve years he had done exactly that. The three-tiered stone platform, 224 feet long and 100 feet wide, remains one of the largest and best-preserved heiau in Hawaii and a sacred site for Native Hawaiian practitioners today.
During the summer of 1862, General George McClellan advanced up the Virginia Peninsula toward Richmond in what became the Peninsula Campaign, met by a series of fierce Confederate counterattacks over seven days of fighting that saved the Confederate capital. The park's thirteen separate units around Richmond and the James River trace the full arc of Union efforts to capture the city from 1862 through the 1864–65 siege.
Theodore Roosevelt's 23-room Victorian Queen Anne home on the north shore of Long Island at Oyster Bay served as the "Summer White House" from 1902 to 1908, where TR conducted the nation's business, received foreign dignitaries, and mediated the treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War — earning him the Nobel Peace Prize. The house is filled with the trophies, books, and artifacts that reflect Roosevelt's outsized personality, including mounted animals from his African safari.
The Cornish, New Hampshire home and studios of Augustus Saint-Gaudens — the leading American sculptor of the Gilded Age, creator of the Shaw Memorial on Boston Common and the $20 Saint-Gaudens gold piece — are set in gardens he designed on a hillside with views of Mount Ascutney. Casts of his major works fill the studios and grounds, making this the largest single collection of Saint-Gaudens sculptures in the world.
The massive 16th and 17th-century Spanish fortifications guarding Old San Juan Harbor — Castillo San Felipe del Morro (El Morro) on the western headland and Castillo San Cristóbal on the landward approach — represent the most complete colonial-era defense system in the Western Hemisphere, with walls up to 20 feet thick and rising 140 feet above the sea. The fortifications repelled attacks by Francis Drake in 1595 and the Earl of Cumberland in 1598 and remained active military installations through the Spanish-American War.
The American victory over General Burgoyne's invading British army in October 1777 — the surrender of nearly 6,000 troops at Saratoga — is widely regarded as the turning point of the Revolutionary War, convincing France to enter the conflict as a formal American ally. The park preserves the rolling Hudson Valley farmland and ridgelines where the two battles of Saratoga were fought.
The 54-mile trail follows the route of the three 1965 voting rights marches from Selma to Alabama's capitol in Montgomery, where Dr. King addressed 25,000 marchers — marches that shocked the nation after state troopers attacked peaceful demonstrators on Bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 within five months of the final march.
The two-day Battle of Shiloh in April 1862 produced 23,746 casualties — more than all American wars combined up to that point — shocking a nation that had expected a quick conflict and ending any hope for an easy Union victory. The battlefield's quiet, rural Tennessee landscape, with its wooded ravines and sunken road known as the "Hornet's Nest," is remarkably well preserved.
Alaska's oldest national park unit protects totem poles standing among old-growth Sitika spruce and hemlock forest at the site of the 1804 Battle of Sitka, where Tlingit warriors made their last stand against the Russian colonial force and were ultimately displaced from their homeland. The visitor center houses an Alaska Native arts workshop where carvers and weavers continue traditional crafts, and the park's coastal forest walk is among the most atmospheric in the NPS system.
On the north side of Jacksonville, this 46,000-acre preserve protects one of the last unspoiled coastal marshes on the Eastern Seaboard — a mosaic of salt marsh, tidal creeks, and ancient maritime hammock — along with Fort Caroline National Memorial, the site of the first French colony in North America, established in 1564. The preserve takes its name from the Timucua people who inhabited these marshes for thousands of years before European contact.
Built in 1763 by Sephardic Jewish merchants in Newport, Touro Synagogue is the oldest surviving synagogue building in the United States and the only colonial-era synagogue still standing in North America, designed by Peter Harrison in Georgian style. President Washington's 1790 letter to the congregation — promising the new government would "give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance" — is one of the foundational documents of American religious freedom.
During the brutal winter of 1777–78, Washington's Continental Army endured six months of cold, disease, and starvation at Valley Forge while Prussian drillmaster Baron Friedrich von Steuben transformed the ragged force into a disciplined professional army capable of defeating the British in open battle. The park preserves earthworks, reconstructed huts, Washington's headquarters, and the rolling Pennsylvania landscape that tested the Revolution.
Grant's 47-day siege of the Confederate fortress city ended on July 4, 1863 — the same day as Gettysburg — giving Union forces control of the entire Mississippi River and splitting the Confederacy in two. More than 1,300 monuments and markers memorialize the campaign across 1,800 acres of hills and ravines overlooking the river, including the restored gunboat USS Cairo.
Maya Lin's spare 1982 design — a V-shaped chevron of polished black granite bearing 58,320 names of the fallen — became one of the most visited and emotionally powerful memorials in the world. Visitors see their own reflections alongside the inscribed names, and offerings left at the wall's base are collected daily by the National Park Service.
The 555-foot white marble obelisk was the tallest man-made structure in the world when completed in 1884, a title it held for five years, and remains the world's tallest stone structure. A change in marble suppliers mid-construction left a faint color band visible one-third of the way up; an elevator carries visitors to the observation level at the top.
In July 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott convened the first women's rights convention in American history; the Declaration of Sentiments signed there — modeled on the Declaration of Independence — demanded the vote and equal legal status for women. The park includes the Wesleyan Chapel convention site, Stanton's home, and a visitor center documenting the 72-year campaign for suffrage.
Fifty-six granite pillars — one for each state and territory — surround the restored Rainbow Pool at the heart of the National Mall, framing the Freedom Wall where 4,048 gold stars each represent 100 American war dead. The memorial honors the 16 million who served in the US armed forces and the more than 400,000 who died.
The largest unit in the entire National Park System at over 13 million acres — larger than California — Wrangell-St. Elias contains more than all other national parks combined, including 9 of the 16 highest peaks in the United States and some of the world's largest non-polar glaciers. The abandoned Kennecott copper mine, which produced $200 million worth of ore between 1903 and 1938, is the preserve's most visited human landmark, accessible by a 60-mile unpaved road.
On December 17, 1903 at Kill Devil Hills, Orville Wright made the first powered, controlled, sustained airplane flight in history — 120 feet in 12 seconds — in a machine he and Wilbur had built in their Dayton bicycle shop. Reconstructed camp buildings, markers for all four flights, and a granite monument atop Big Kill Devil Hill preserve the site of aviation's birth.
This 2.5-million-acre preserve protects a 128-mile stretch of the Yukon River between Eagle and Circle — a corridor rich in Klondike gold rush history, with abandoned roadhouses, cabins, and the wrecks of sternwheelers — along with the entire undeveloped watershed of the wild Charley River. The preserve hosts the highest density of nesting peregrine falcons in Alaska and is reached only by boat, plane, or winter sled.