It takes a lot of time and effort to reconstruct an entire 18th century star fort more or less from scratch. It’s not something you see being done that often. Yet that’s just what happened with Fort Stanwix National Monument back in the 1970s.
The trouble with the Smithsonian Institution is that it simply has way too much stuff to see. That’s not such a bad thing, though.
George Washington’s plantation home is still around, and it’s still presenting a somewhat airbrushed image of the man.
The National Park Service now cares for what was once America’s oldest and largest federal armory. If you want to see hundreds of firearms stacked up in intimidating rows, this is the place to be.
It’s almost exactly 198 years ago that John Adams died (July 4, 1826), and 18 years since the HBO miniseries “John Adams” caught the public imagination and led to a widespread reconsideration of America’s much-maligned second president. The hoopla around that series has died down but the Adams’s home is still open to the public.
It’s all very well visiting grand historic homes and grand museums, but sometimes a very ordinary-looking old structure can grab the imagination and unexpectedly suck you in. That was my experience with the Mingus Grist Mill at Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Easily the most prominent “man on a horse” statue at Virginia’s Manassas National Battlefield Park is that of Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Weirdly, it’s a.) only been around since 1940, and b.) looks nothing like the real Jackson—or his horse.
Alexander Hamilton’s storming of Redoubt #10 was only a small part of a battle that, over the course of nearly three weeks, had relatively little to do with storming barricades and lots to do with big cannons blasting away at each other.
Dougie Does Monuments 