50 great American places : essential historic sites across the U.S

314 Pages·2016·49.13 MB·English

by  Brent D. Glass

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CONTENTS
Places by State
Foreword by David McCullough
Introduction
Author’s Note
1. The National Mall (Washington, D.C.)
2. The Mounds and the Arch (IL/MO)
3. Mesa Verde (CO)
4. The Palace of the Governors (NM)
5. Witch Trials (MA)
6. Boundary Line (DE)
7. Forks of the Ohio (PA)
8. Freedom Trail (MA)
9. The Liberty Bell (PA)
10. Virginia Peninsula (VA)
11. Monticello (VA)
12. The Presidio at the Golden Gate (CA)
13. White Dove of the Desert (AZ)
14. Slater Mill (RI)
15. Village Green (OH)
16. Two Utopias (IN)
17. Railroad University of the United States (MD)
18. The Alamo (TX)
19. Declaration of Sentiments (NY)
20. Temple Square (UT)
21. Fort Sumter (SC)
22. New Birth of Freedom (PA)
23. Schoolhouse and Fieldhouse (KS)
24. First National Park (WY)
25. Nook Farm Neighbors: Stowe and Twain (CT)
26. Willa Cather’s Great Prairie (NE)
27. Indian Wars (MT/SD)
28. The Bridge and the Statue (NY)
29. Edison’s Laboratory (NJ)
30. World’s Columbian Exposition (IL)
31. Biltmore House (NC)
32. Taliesin (WI)
33. First Flight (NC)
34. Grand Central Terminal (NY)
35. Birthplace of Jazz (LA)
36. Legendary Hollywood: Warner Bros. Studio (CA)
37. Ford Rouge (MI)
38. Will Rogers Highway (OK)
39. The Mother Church of Country Music (TN)
40. Hoover Dam (NV)
41. Pearl Harbor (HI)
42. Minidoka Camp (ID)
43. Manhattan Project (WA)
44. Sweet Auburn (GA)
45. Central High School (AK)
46. Salk Institute (CA)
47. Saturn V Rocket (AL)
48. Magic Kingdoms (FL)
49. Silicon Valley (CA)
50. Malls of America (MN)
Acknowledgments
About Brent D. Glass
Bibliography
Index
To the memory of my parents,
JOSEPH AND CORINNE GLASS,
who inspired my love of history and learning
PLACES BY STATE
Author’s note: Some essays in this book describe more than one place; therefore, the
total number of sites is greater than fifty. But most readers will agree that the
United States has many more than fifty great places. I hope you will add to the list.
The list of places by state includes the town or city in which the site is located or,
in some cases, the nearest town to that site. The site mentioned on this list is the
major subject of each essay.
ALABAMA
Huntsville/Saturn V Rocket ARIZONA
Tucson/Mission San Xavier del Bac ARKANSAS
Little Rock/Little Rock Central High School CALIFORNIA
Burbank/Warner Bros. Studio La Jolla/Salk Institute Palo Alto/Silicon Valley San
Francisco/The Presidio at the Golden Gate COLORADO
Cortez/Mesa Verde
CONNECTICUT
Hartford/Nook Farm
DELAWARE
New Castle/New Castle Court House FLORIDA
Orlando/EPCOT
Celebration
Maitland/Research Studio GEORGIA
Atlanta/Historic Ebenezer Baptist Church Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic
Site HAWAII
Honolulu/Pearl Harbor IDAHO
Jerome/Minidoka
ILLINOIS
Collinsville/Cahokia Mounds Chicago/World’s Columbian Exposition INDIANA
New Harmony
KANSAS
Lawrence/Allen Fieldhouse Manhattan/Kansas State University LOUISIANA
New Orleans/Jazz National Historical Park MARYLAND
Baltimore/B&O Railroad Museum MASSACHUSETTS
Boston/Freedom Trail Salem/Witch Trials Memorial MICHIGAN
Dearborn/Ford Rouge Complex MINNESOTA
Edina/Southdale Center Bloomington/Mall of America MISSOURI
St. Louis/Gateway Arch MONTANA
Crow Agency/Little Bighorn Battlefield NEBRASKA
Red Cloud/Willa Cather Memorial Prairie NEVADA
Boulder City/Hoover Dam NEW JERSEY
West Orange/Edison’s Laboratory NEW MEXICO
Santa Fe/Palace of the Governors NEW YORK
New York/Brooklyn Bridge, Statue of Liberty New York/Grand Central Terminal
Seneca Falls/Women’s Rights National Historical Park NORTH CAROLINA
Asheville/Biltmore House Kill Devil Hills/Wright Brothers National Memorial
OHIO
Hudson/Village Green OKLAHOMA
Claremore/Will Rogers Highway PENNSYLVANIA
Gettysburg/Gettysburg National Military Park Philadelphia/Liberty Bell
Pittsburgh/Forks of the Ohio RHODE ISLAND
Pawtucket/Slater Mill SOUTH CAROLINA
Charleston/Fort Sumter National Monument SOUTH DAKOTA Pine
Ridge/Wounded Knee Monument TENNESSEE
Nashville/Ryman Auditorium TEXAS
San Antonio/The Alamo UTAH
Salt Lake City/Temple Square VIRGINIA
Charlottesville/Monticello Yorktown/Virginia Peninsula WASHINGTON
Richland/Hanford B Reactor WASHINGTON, D.C.
The National Mall
WISCONSIN
Spring Green/Taliesin WYOMING
Yellowstone National Park
FOREWORD
BY DAVID MCCULLOUGH
W
hen Brent Glass, a friend of many years, first told me about the book he planned
to write, I said immediately I thought it a marvelous idea and that it would fill a real
need. I also wondered to myself why in the world I hadn’t thought of it. Journeys to
great historic sites had been high points for me since boyhood and have remained a
mainstay of my work from the time I embarked on my first book. But no, I
thought. With all his scholarship and professional experience as a public historian,
Brent was just the one for the task. Indeed, I know of no one who knows more
about American historic sites. Public historians believe that history should be
accessible to all, that it is much too important to leave to academics alone or solely
to the classroom, and as a public historian Brent is a national leader.
We first met in 1989, at the Centennial of the Johnstown Flood, and were
happy to discover how many interests we had in common. He was then head of the
Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Later, during the years he
served as director of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian,
our paths crossed more and more, and our ensuing friendship became one of the
prime rewards of our shared interest in how much of the story of our country is to
be found all around us, as part of the immense American landscape.
As it was for Brent, my first journey into history began at about age ten with a
visit with my parents to a historical landmark, Fort Necessity in western
Pennsylvania, some sixty miles southeast of our home in Pittsburgh. The site of the
first skirmish of the French and Indian War, it is where young Lieutenant Colonel
George Washington and his troops suffered a humiliating defeat. There was not a
whole lot to be seen—a replica of a small wooden fort set in an open field—but it
certainly made a lasting impression.
In grade school we learned more of what had happened right in Pittsburgh
during the eighteenth century and that Brent gives appropriate attention to in his
chapter on the Forks of the Ohio. Later, while in high school, I had the good
fortune to travel further into history during a spring vacation road trip with a friend
and his parents through much of Virginia, with stops at Monticello and Mount
Vernon, and the experience opened my mind and imagination to history as nothing
yet had.
Over the years since, my wife, Rosalee, and I made a point of taking our own
children to historic sites across much of the country whenever possible, and always
with pronounced results. One of our sons tells me he still remembers the family
expedition to the Custer Battlefield (now called Little Bighorn Battlefield) in
Montana in every detail, while his brother loves to recount going to Mystic Seaport
on the coast of Connecticut on a cold, nasty day to go on board the famous whaling
ship The Morgan and listen to the tour guide tell all about the ship and its voyages.
To this day, he says, he can’t drive by Mystic without feeling the pull of those
stories.
And the effect can carry down the line. Our youngest daughter’s reaction to the
Frontier Culture Museum in the Shenandoah Valley, in Staunton, Virginia, a
beautiful complex of early farms of different varieties, was everything a parent could
hope for. Twenty years later she would see the same response in her seven-year-old
son.
But until now there has never been a guidebook like this by someone with such a
background as Brent Glass. He has not only traveled to each of the fifty historic
sites he describes, but to another hundred or more besides. In lectures he likes to
stress “the power of place,” and certainly there is that aplenty in the panorama of
places to be found in these pages.
The geographic reach of the book extends north, south, coast to coast, and
beyond to Pearl Harbor. At the same time, as he points out, a chronological span of
nearly a thousand years is to be found in the ancient Cahokia Mounds in western
Illinois and the great Gateway Arch in St. Louis built in the 1960s, both on the
Mississippi River and only eight miles apart. Even greater is the reach into the past
of the prehistoric site called Meadowcroft, again near Pittsburgh, where human
habitation dates back 16,000 years.
Clearly, too—and admirably—the choice of subjects here leaves no doubt that
history, so often dominated by politics and war, comprises far more. And so here,
also, one will find ample reminders of who we are as a people, and why we are the
way we are, as expressed in American art, music, science and technology, medicine,
manufacturing, and literature.
I was delighted to find included Red Cloud, Nebraska, the childhood home of
the great American novelist Willa Cather. As Brent writes, no one explored the
theme of the American pioneers and their impact on the land more eloquently than
she. The town of Red Cloud, so much of which has been preserved, is, as he says, “a