More National Park Sites

The National Park System is much bigger than most people picture. Besides the great western parks, it includes forts, battlefields, birthplaces, theaters, caves, canals and trails, more than 400 sites in all. This board gathers a wide sampling of them.

Ford's Theater in Washington is where John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865. The government bought the building afterward and used it for offices for decades. It was restored and reopened as a working theater in 1968. Lincoln's own story turns up elsewhere on this board too, with his birthplace in Kentucky, where a stone memorial building encloses a small log cabin, and his boyhood home in Indiana.

New York sites include Castle Clinton, a round stone fort built at the tip of Manhattan before the War of 1812. It later served as a concert hall, then as the city's immigrant station from 1855 to 1890, and then as the New York Aquarium. Federal Hall stands on Wall Street where George Washington took the oath as the first president in 1789. The building there now is a later customs house, put up on the same spot.

The South has some of the oldest and some of the newest stories. Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, Florida, is a Spanish fort built of coquina, a stone made of crushed shells. Andersonville, in Georgia, was the most notorious prison camp of the Civil War. The Selma to Montgomery trail marks the voting rights march of 1965. Tuskegee, in Alabama, has 2 sites, one for Booker T. Washington's school and one for the Tuskegee Airmen, the first Black military pilots in the U.S. Army.

Then there is Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, the longest known cave system in the world, and a few of the western parks, including Mount Rushmore, Grand Teton and Zion. One thing worth noticing across all of these is how often a building had a second life. Forts became concert halls, theaters became offices, and prisons became memorials. The pictures often catch a site in the middle of one of those changes.