Category Archives: National Park Service

Morristown National Historical Park turns 90

04 Saturday Mar 2023

Posted by in George Washington, National Park Service

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Morristown National Historical Park ninetieth anniversary celebration, March 4, 2023

I had a good time in New Jersey today at the ninetieth anniversary celebration of Morristown National Historical Park. Although we usually associate Franklin Roosevelt with the shifting focus on the national parks from the West to the East, it was actually Herbert Hoover who began the process. The lame duck executive signed the enabling legislation creating the first national historical park on March 2, 1933 in the waning days of his presidency. MORR is one of the gems in Park Service system, and spread across several locations as it is has something for everyone. Above we see the ribbon cutting that took place after this afternoon’s keynote address. The historical park is having a number of events throughout the year. In fact, on Saturday June 17 a guy with my initials will be giving a talk in the museum behind the Ford Mansion. The topic is based on an article I recently wrote about a project undertaken for a decade in the 1910s and 1920s sponsored by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in cooperation with the National Park Service.

Sunday morning coffee

03 Sunday Apr 2022

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Ranger Soskin receiving an award from Congressman Mark DeSaulnier, February 8, 2020

I’m having my coffee before settling in to edit a project I’ve been working on for many months now. I’m about a thousand words over the count but I’ll submit as is in two weeks and let the chips fall where they may. I’ve been getting texts from people I know whose kids go to UNC talking about last night’s game. I’m not much of a basketball guy but March (and April) Madness is always a fun thing to watch, if personally a step or two removed. They play the ACC tournament every year at the Barclays Center and the teams stay at the Marriott hotel down the street from where I work. When I see buses and team decals in the window of the lobby I know it’s the end of winter.

These past few days I have been reading of the retirement of one-hundred-year-old Park Service ranger Betty Reid Soskin. Though strictly speaking she was not a Rosie the Riveter–those particular jobs were strictly segregated, as was the military itself–she did play a role on the home front during World War II. Ranger Soskin was an institution for years at Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park in California. Here is an in depth article from 2018 that gives a fair amount of detail about her life and times. Among other things she dated Jackie Robinson, which given her rich life barely gets a mention before the article moves on. Not long ago I was on the social media feed of a historian I follow who wrote of her experience as a seasonal at the Charlestown Navy Yard, which is part of Boston National Historical Park. She spoke of doing interp on the ships, which are now museums. During her time there were still numerous veterans who volunteered aboard the ships speaking to the public. Those Navy veterans are now largely gone. Soskin’s retirement from the Rosie Riveter NHP is a similar loss.

(image/Congressman Mark DeSaulnier)

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The life and times of Edward M. Riley

07 Thursday Nov 2019

Posted by in Independence National Historical Park, Interpretation, National Park Service, Philadelphia

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I was up and out of the house early this past Sunday to attend the Hackensack Toy Soldier show in New Jersey. One of the things that came home with me, purchased for a mere $1, is this 1956 National Park Service handbook about Independence National Historical Park. I have a number of modern NPS handbooks that I have purchased over the past several years for the Civil War sesquicentennial and War of 1812 bicentennial. Last year when a friend and I visited Philadelphia I bought The American Revolution handbook as well. The one we see here was written by Park Service historian Edward M. Riley, who authored a number of similar booklets on other sites in this period when the Eisenhower Administration was starting the Mission 66 initiative. One can actually read his tome on Independence National Historical Park online here. Yes, the scholarship moves on–we’re talking two decades prior even to the Bicentennial here–but in addition to keeping up with current progress in my fields of interest I am always intrigued by how historians in the past, in this case the 1950s, handled the topic at hand.

Ladybird and President Johnson with the Reverend Cotesworth Pinckney Lewis, November 1967. Days after this photograph was taken Riley telegrammed Johnson an apology for Lewis’s statements concerning the Vietnam War.

A Proquest search pulls up a small but interesting series of takes on Edward M. Riley’s life and career. In 1955 he had just left his position as historian at Independence Hall and was now at Colonial Williamsburg about to take part in a five-year, $500,000 project to study life in Colonial America. Clearly his mission was to do at Williamsburg what he had done in Philadelphia. In 1959 he is found still at Colonial Williamsburg, serving as director of research, and giving the government of Bermuda a trove of 650 letters related to that nation on the 350th anniversary of the founding of the Colony of Bermuda. In October 1963 Riley comes to Oyster Bay, Long Island to give a talk to raise funds for the renovation of Raynham Hall, a Revolutionary War site. That event was held at Christ Protestant Episcopal Church.

The reason I mention the location is because of the final piece that mentions Riley. In November 1967, Edward M. Riley, a senior warden in the Bruton Parish Episcopal Church of Williamsburg, telegramms President Lyndon B. Johnson an apology after the Rev. Cotesworth Pinckney Lewis challenged the president, who had been at the Virginia church’s service the week previously, from the pulpit on his Vietnam War policies. Riley’s role in the apology is unclear; the article seems to imply that the Bruton Parish leadership were sending the missive on orders from the Episcopal Church’s more senior leadership. Public pressure was certainly intense, with over 10,000 calls and letters coming in from around the world. Johnson was furious. It’s an extraordinary story and part of the life of an extraordinary historian and figure.

(bottom image/Historic Images Outlet)

Sunday morning coffee

11 Sunday Aug 2019

Posted by in Federal Hall National Memorial, Genealogy, George Washington, Heritage tourism, National Park Service

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One of the most rewarding things about volunteering with the Park Service, in addition to collaborating alongside the amazing rangers who work there, is meeting the public. Everyone visits a site bringing their own expectations to what they hope to get out of it. For some that means using the bathroom and leaving without saying a word, which is fine. Others however visit on some sort of mission or purpose. We had a few of these yesterday at Federal Hall. Here are two:

Two fellows came in from rural Pennsylvania in mid-afternoon. I showed them around and then got into a longer conversation with one of them. He told me had never thought much about history until earlier this year, when his sister discovered a trove of letters written by an ancestor who had served in New Jersey regiment during the Civil War. One thing led to another and after some digging he discovered that his family roots date back in the New World to the 1640s. This knowledge in turn led him to studying not just the Civil War but the Early American period. Thus he and his friend were making the rounds of various historic sites. They were on their way to Fraunces Tavern after Federal Hall.

He told me his son lives in Brooklyn and therefore he comes to the city frequently. So I quickly jotted the names of further historic sites in various boroughs he might try to see when time permits. I will never know if he follows through. Hopefully he will.

1989 presidential inaugral ticket

Later a man came in with his son and we too got into a conversation. As it turned out for decades, going back to the 1980s, he was a White House correspondent for a major newspaper syndicate. We got to talking about the evolution of the newspaper industry, which in turn led to a discussion of covering various historical events. I mentioned George H.W. Bush having been at Federal Hall in April 1989 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Washington’s First Inaugural. The man mentioned that the event had been part of a larger project that took place over that year starting in January called “From George to George.” The retired journalist had an extraordinary amount of institutional memory.

Stories like the above are just two examples of the things one only gets from being at the place itself. People, at least some of them, come in reflective and eager to share what led them to come and experience the thing for themselves.

(image/picclick)

Sunday morning coffee

16 Sunday Jun 2019

Posted by in Early American Period, Federal Hall National Memorial, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George Washington, Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), National Park Service

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New York City’s Federal Hall as it was around the time of Washington’s first inaugural. Even after the federal government moved to Philadelphia in 1790 this building and property would prove central local and national events.

I hope everyone’s summer is off to a good start. Happy Father’s Day to all dads out there. Posting will pick up here now that the summer days have settled into something of a pattern. With the academic year over I again began volunteering with the Park Service. This summer I am at Federal Hall. Though I never planned it this way, it has been something of a run through the various New York City sites. There is actually a great deal of overlap in the histories of these places, and Federal Hall has a unique story and provenance spanning many centuries. The site itself was placed under the auspices of the Park Service by the Franklin Roosevelt Administration, who did so eighty years ago in 1939 around the same time they quashed Robert Moses’s Brooklyn-Battery Bridge. The Early American Period is an era about which I know fairly little and I have thus spent much of my time since submitting grades Memorial Day Weekend engrossing myself in the literature. I find it comforting on a number of levels, not least as I try to understand our own troubling and disturbing times. The Founding Father have so much to teach us.

The site upon which stood Federal Hall has been many things over time. It was where the First Congress met and where George Washington was sworn in as our first president. The original building was torn down in 1812 and a customs house built on the choice Wall Street property in 1842. During the Civil War it became the New York Sub-Treasury, and would remain so until just after the First World War. A great deal of all this also ties in to my book manuscript, which really excites me. I am already up-and-running, writing some bits for the social media and giving tours. I’m looking forward to telling more stories and jumping in.

(image/Robert Shaw sketch via NYPL)

 

The 1865 Colfax Expedition

09 Thursday Aug 2018

Posted by in Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Law Olmsted, Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), National Park Service, Schuyler Colfax, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President)

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In late June 1864, with the country still reeling from Ulysses S. Grant’s bloody Overland Campaign, President Lincoln signed legislation granting Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove to the state of California. I speak in my manuscript about how forward-thinking many were even in the worst depths of the war about what might come afterward, hence the passage of the Pacific Railroad, Homestead, and Land-Grant College bills as early as 1862. The 1864 Yosemite Act was a part of that optimism. Eight years after this, President Grant put Yellowstone under federal control. In between, in the summer of 1865, Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax led an expedition out west just after the Civil War to review the situation. Three years after all this Colfax became Grant’s running mate and then served four years as vice-president from 1869-73.

Frederick Law Olmsted (second from left front row) read his report on Yosemite and Mariposa Grove to House Speaker Schuyler Colfax and his entourage on 9 August 1865. Olmsted, his wife Mary (seated next to him), and the expedition then sat for this image. With the Civil War finally over, Americans were thinking of the possibilities for the future.

Frederick Law Olmsted left his position as secretary of the U.S. Sanitary Commission in mid-1863 and took a position in California managing the Mariposa mining estate. There he was horrified by the corruption and environmental depredations he saw. A bright spot was that he was eventually placed on a committee to examine how the state of California might preserve Yosemite and Mariposa. Back in Washington on 14 April 1865 Grant and Colfax both begged out of attending My American Cousin at Ford’s Theater with President and Mrs. Lincoln. That same day Lincoln spoke to Colfax excitedly about the Speaker’s upcoming trip out west. As Colfax remembered it, Lincoln told him, “Mr. Colfax, I want you to take a message from me to the miners whom you visit. I have very large ideas of the mineral wealth of our nation. I believe it practically inexhaustible. It abounds all over the Western country, from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, and its development has scarcely commenced.” Later that evening Booth shot Lincoln and the president died the next morning.

Colfax and his entourage headed west shortly after the president”s assassination and traveled many thousands of miles by various means, taking in what they saw and thinking optimistically about the possibilities for the reunified country. By early August they reached Yosemite and toured that beautiful valley along with the sequoias at Mariposa Grove. On 9 August 1865 Speaker of the House Colfax and others listened to Frederick Law Olmsted read his “Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove: A Preliminary Report,” the study that Olmsted and his team had written for state officials outlining how California might best preserve these sites. The state eventually did nt pursue many of the commission’s recommendations, deeming them too expensive and impractical. It was not a total loss. The Colfax Expedition helped lay the groundwork for President Grant’s signing in March 1872 of the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act. It was the start of the environmental movement here in the United States. Yosemite and the great sequoias too eventually came under the management of the National Park Service.

(image by Carleton Watkins; Courtesy Yosemite National Park Research Library)

 

Yosemite and the Civil War

30 Saturday Jun 2018

Posted by in Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), Museums, National Park Service

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Albert Bierstadt began “Valley of the Yosemite” in 1863 and completed the small painting, less than 1′ x 2′, in early 1864. That spring it sold at the New York Sanitary Fair for $1600. In June Congress and Lincoln granted Yosemite and Big Tree Grove to California and Frederick Law Olmsted studied the area for the state over the next year. The painting today is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant Act on this date in 1864. This legislation deeded Yosemite and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove to the state of California. It is interesting to note that Congress wrote and President Lincoln signed the measure in late June 1864, just days after the Overland Campaign in which so many men had been killed or wounded in ghastly ways. Even with the war far from decided people were looking ahead.

I tell the story a little bit in my book. The painting we see here was begun by Albert Bierstadt in 1863 and finished in 1864. While out west Bierstadt was also writing to his good friend John Hay, Lincoln’s secretary, back in Washington about the scenic beauty of California. It is not difficult to imagine Hay describing all this to his boss in the White House. As it happened, another man from back east was in California in 1863: Frederick Law Olmsted. He had resigned his position as secretary of the United States Sanitary Commission in September to take a job running a mine in Mariposa. Olmsted was burned out from his work with the Sanitary Commission and got as far away as he could by going out west. Soon after Lincoln signed the Yosemite legislation, Frederick Law Olmsted found himself part of a commission whose job it was to survey Yosemite and the Big Tree Grove and create for California officials a plan the state might use to make these protected parklands. Olmsted and his colleagues went about their task and submitted a report in August 1865. California officials ultimately tabled Olmsted’s report, deeming his provisions too expensive.

As for the painting we see above, it quickly ended up in New York City just after Albert Bierstadt completed it in early 1864. That spring officials of the Sanitary Commission sold the art work during the Metropolitan Sanitary Fair. The fair, like others held in various locales, raised funds for the Sanitary Commission to do its work tending the needs of soldiers out in the field. Albert Bierstadt’s “Valley of the Yosemite” sold for $1600, the highest sum for any artwork on sale for charity at the New York Sanitary Fair.

(image/Museum of Fine Arts Boston)

Sunday morning coffee

03 Sunday Jun 2018

Posted by in General Grant National Memorial (NPS), Heritage tourism, National Park Service

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I am having my coffee getting ready to head out the door in a bit for my first day at Grant’s Tomb. Yesterday a friend and I took the bus to Philadelphia to visit the Museum of the American Revolution. The Revolutionary War period is something I know little about. My first experience visiting sites related to the period came a few years ago when my aunt and uncle took me to Lexington and Concord. It was an experience that has stayed with me. Of course we have a certain amount of Revolutionary War sites here in New York City as well, though the heritage tourism is less pronounced. Apparently the Museum of the American Revolution now stands on the site of what what used to be a visitor center for the nearby attractions.

The image of me above was taken yesterday outside of Independence Hall. If you look closely at the date, Lincoln’s visit fell on Washington’s Birthday 1861. This was while Lincoln was president-elect and on his way from Illinois to Washington for his inaugural. He was here in New York just a few days before this meeting with Edwin D. Morgan and others. Note that this tablet was put there by a Grand Army of the Republic post, though alas it does not give the year. A tablet next to this one mentions a John F. Kennedy visit to Independence Hall on July 4, 1962. We could not go into Independence Hall because tickets for the day were sold out but we weren’t too concerned because the museum was our main focus for the day. We did sit on an interpretive talk by park ranger of the adjacent Congress Hall. The ranger did a great job telling the audience about the significance of the hall and, among other things, about John Adams’s swearing in there as the second president.

I had an aunt who died about three years ago who lived in Greater Philadelphia. She loved visiting places like this and I’m sure over the years came here regularly with her elementary school students. There was a Boy Scout troop sitting in on the ranger talk and a group of young high schoolers in matching red t-shirts from Ohio in the museum. I love seeing the continuity and had to text my mother and tell her I was thinking of her older sister. Overall it made for a great day. We already have plans to visit again next year and take in the full experience. Now I’m off to the General Grant National Memorial. Enjoy your Sunday.

Rededicating the Merle Hay monument

19 Tuesday Sep 2017

Posted by in Governors Island, Great War centennial, Monuments and Statuary, National Park Service

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Merle Hay monument rededication, Governors Island: 17 September 2017

One of the most poignant moments at Camp Doughboy this past weekend was the rededication of the Merle Hay monument on Sunday morning. The color guard you see here are active service personnel currently serving in the First Division’s 16th Infantry Regiment. They had come from Fort Riley in Kansas and are the same men who had been in Paris this past July for the ceremonies there. The men in uniform behind them are living historians who had set up camp on the island for the weekend. I snapped the image of the new tablet a few minutes after the unveiling. I thought I would re-up the video we produced a few summers ago about Private Merle B. Hay. It is so good to see that the Hay tablet is back where it belongs.

Private Merle Hay tablet, Governors Island National Monument