50 Fun Facts About US National Monuments

Which rock formation from the climax of Close Encounters of the Third Kind was the first US national monument?

Devils Tower was proclaimed the first national monument on September 24, 1906. Its name has no apostrophe because a geographic naming standard leaves them out.

Which former immigration station, once America's busiest, was added to Statue of Liberty National Monument in 1965?

Ellis Island processed about 12 million immigrants between 1892 and 1954. By one estimate, two-fifths of Americans may descend from someone who passed through it.

Which Baltimore landmark, whose 1814 defense inspired the US anthem, is the only National Monument and Historic Shrine?

Fort McHenry was a national park from 1925 until 1939, when it was given its unique double title. Francis Scott Key wrote the anthem's words after its flag survived a 25-hour British bombardment.

Which Cascade volcano's deadly 1980 eruption led Congress to create a National Volcanic Monument around it?

Mount St. Helens killed 57 people and destroyed 200 homes when it erupted. The monument around it is run by the US Forest Service, not the National Park Service.

Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in Montana marks the 1876 defeat of which US Army officer?

George Armstrong Custer died there along with every soldier of the five companies riding with him. The site was called Custer Battlefield National Monument until a 1991 law renamed it for the battle.

Which Arizona landmark was a national monument for eleven years before it became a national park in 1919?

Grand Canyon was proclaimed a national monument in 1908, and Congress upgraded it in 1919. A second monument of the same name was proclaimed to the west in 1932 and folded into the park in 1975.

The Aleutian Islands World War II National Monument covers Attu and Kiska, occupied in 1942 by which country?

Japan landed troops on Kiska and Attu in June 1942. It was the first time a foreign power had invaded and occupied the continental United States since the War of 1812.

Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument in Maine was created from land donated by a co-founder of which company?

Burt's Bees co-founder Roxanne Quimby gave the land, valued at $60 million, in 2016. She had wanted a national park, but switched to a monument after politicians opposed the idea.

Which president signed the 1906 law that created national monuments and proclaimed the very first one months later?

Theodore Roosevelt signed the law on June 8, 1906, and used it for the first time that September. Congress had written it to protect Native American ruins from the collectors known as pot hunters.

Which California park, home to North America's lowest point, spent 61 years as a national monument first?

Death Valley was proclaimed a national monument by Herbert Hoover in 1933 and only became a national park in 1994. Its Badwater Basin lies 282 feet below sea level.

Which New York City national monument, designated in 2016, was the first dedicated to LGBTQ rights and history?

Stonewall National Monument covers the Stonewall Inn and tiny Christopher Park in Greenwich Village. A police raid on the bar on June 28, 1969, set off the riots widely seen as the start of the modern LGBTQ rights movement.

Which redwood grove near San Francisco became a national monument in 1908 after William Kent donated the land?

Muir Woods got its name because William Kent insisted the monument honor the naturalist John Muir. Kent had bought the canyon in 1905 to stop logging, then gave it away when a water company moved to dam its creek.

Carrizo Plain National Monument in California is an easy place to see surface fractures of which fault?

San Andreas Fault movement has shifted the bed of Wallace Creek, which crosses it at right angles, by 425 feet. Geologists used the creek to work out the first slip rate measured along the fault.

Which abolitionist born enslaved in Maryland was honored there in 2013 with an Underground Railroad national monument?

Harriet Tubman was born into slavery in Dorchester County, where the monument was created on March 25, 2013. Congress later folded it into a national historical park that has a sister park in New York.

Whose 1955 murder in Mississippi is remembered, with his mother's activism, by a national monument created in 2023?

Emmett Till was 14 when he was abducted and lynched. The monument, covering a Chicago church and two Mississippi sites, was established on what would have been his 82nd birthday.

The Washington Monument was the world's tallest structure from 1884 until which landmark overtook it in 1889?

The Eiffel Tower took the record when it was completed in Paris. Despite its name, the 555-foot obelisk is officially a national memorial, and its marble changes shade a third of the way up because the quarry changed.

At the cottage now protected as President Lincoln and Soldiers' Home National Monument, Lincoln drafted which document?

The Emancipation Proclamation took shape in a preliminary draft during Lincoln's first summer at the cottage, in 1862. He lived there from June to November in 1862, 1863 and 1864.

Which 1906 law lets US presidents proclaim national monuments on federal land without waiting for Congress?

The Antiquities Act has been upheld repeatedly by the Supreme Court, which ruled that it gives presidents wide discretion over what to protect and how large an area to reserve.

Which New Mexico national monument, surrounded by a missile range, was upgraded to a national park in 2019?

White Sands protects the largest gypsum dunefield on Earth, holding about 4.5 billion tons of gypsum sand. It had been a national monument since Herbert Hoover proclaimed it in 1933.

Scotts Bluff National Monument in Nebraska preserves a landmark that guided emigrants on which wagon route west?

The Oregon Trail at first passed south of the bluff, through Robidoux Pass. California Trail emigrants and Pony Express riders steered by the same landmark.

Craters of the Moon National Monument, where Apollo astronauts trained to collect rocks, lies in which state?

Idaho is where Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell, Eugene Cernan and Joe Engle practised picking out good rock specimens on a lava field. The Apollo missions later showed the real Moon looks little like it.

Dinosaur National Monument, famous for its Wall of Bones, straddles the border of Utah and which other state?

Colorado holds most of the monument, though the fossil quarry itself is on the Utah side. The Wall of Bones is a steeply tilted rock layer studded with thousands of dinosaur fossils.

Canyon de Chelly National Monument in Arizona lies within the boundaries of which Native American nation?

The Navajo Nation surrounds the monument, in the Four Corners region. The word Chelly is a Spanish borrowing of a Navajo term meaning rock canyon.

Castillo de San Marcos National Monument, the oldest masonry fort in the continental US, stands in which Florida city?

St. Augustine's fort is built of coquina, a stone of bonded shells first laid in 1672. English cannonballs sank into the walls instead of shattering them.

Cabrillo National Monument marks where the first European expedition landed on the future US West Coast, in which city?

San Diego Bay is where Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo came ashore on September 28, 1542. The monument sits at the tip of Point Loma, beside a lighthouse that closed in 1891 because fog kept hiding its light.

Vermilion Cliffs National Monument in Arizona became a release site in 1996 for which endangered bird?

The California condor, North America's largest land bird, was reintroduced there because the area is so remote and empty of people.

Which explorer carved his signature and the date in 1806 on Pompeys Pillar, now a national monument in Montana?

William Clark signed the rock on July 25, 1806, while travelling down the Yellowstone River valley with Sacagawea and her son Pomp. Hundreds of later visitors carved their initials beside his.

Jewel Cave National Monument, named for the calcite crystals lining its walls, lies in the Black Hills of which state?

South Dakota's Jewel Cave has more than 220 miles of mapped passages, placing it among the longest caves on Earth. In 1908 it became the first national monument created to protect a cave.

George Washington Carver National Monument, the first dedicated to an African American, is in which state?

Missouri's Newton County holds the monument, two miles west of the town of Diamond. Franklin Roosevelt approved it in July 1943, six months after Carver died.

Which sculptor oversaw the carving of Mount Rushmore National Memorial between 1927 and 1941?

Gutzon Borglum argued the sculpture should be national in scope rather than regional, and convinced its backers to choose four presidents. His son, named Lincoln, helped him carry out the work.

Which Utah national monument, proclaimed in 2016, was to be co-managed with a coalition of five Native American tribes?

Bears Ears takes its name from a pair of buttes that rise above 8,900 feet. Each of the five tribes, all with ancestral ties to the region, sends one member to the coalition.

Which Utah national monument protects a 290-foot-high sandstone arch reached by a two-hour boat ride on Lake Powell?

Rainbow Bridge is one of the largest natural arches in the world, long held sacred by Native Americans of the region. The rising lake made motorboat access easy and brought thousands of visitors a year.

Which president made the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands a marine national monument after a White House film screening?

George W. Bush acted in June 2006, two months after watching Jean-Michel Cousteau's documentary Voyage to Kure. The monument, since named Papahānaumokuākea, is larger than all of America's national parks combined.

Which president protected 56 million acres of Alaska as national monuments by proclamation on a single day in 1978?

Jimmy Carter proclaimed 17 monuments on December 1, 1978, days before a deadline for settling Alaska's federal lands ran out. Two years later, almost to the day, he signed the sweeping Alaska lands act.

Which president declared the Statue of Liberty a national monument in 1924, 38 years after its dedication?

Calvin Coolidge used the 1906 monuments law to protect the statue. Its dedication had been led by an earlier president, Grover Cleveland, who crossed the harbor by yacht after New York's first ticker-tape parade.

Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah became, in 1996, the first national monument managed by which federal agency?

The Bureau of Land Management had never been put in charge of a national monument before. Grand Staircase-Escalante, proclaimed at the height of the 1996 presidential campaign, became the first of many on its lands.

Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument, where workers found mammoth bones in 1933, lies near which US city?

Las Vegas gives its name to the wash where the monument sits. Created in 2014, it protects Ice Age fossils, beginning with the Columbian mammoth that quarry workers dug up.

Which East Coast national park began in 1916 as Sieur de Monts National Monument?

Acadia was proclaimed a monument by Woodrow Wilson, then spent a decade as Lafayette National Park. It took its present name in 1929, in honor of the former French colony that once included Maine.

Frances Perkins National Monument in Maine honors the first woman in a US president's cabinet, who held which post?

Secretary of Labor was her post from 1933, when the Great Depression had put millions out of work. The monument is a 57-acre property with an 1837 brick farmhouse, where she spent many years as a child and again late in life.

Fort Monroe National Monument, nicknamed Freedom's Fortress after an 1861 decision on escaped slaves, is in which state?

Virginia's Fort Monroe is where General Benjamin Butler decided in May 1861 that enslaved men who reached Union lines were contraband of war and would not be sent back.

Since 1950, creating or enlarging a national monument in which state has required the consent of Congress?

Wyoming won the exemption after the controversial proclamation of Jackson Hole National Monument in 1943. The 1950 law that folded Jackson Hole into Grand Teton National Park wrote the limit in.

Montezuma Castle National Monument in Arizona preserves a five-story cliff dwelling built by which pre-Columbian people?

The Sinagua built it, but settlers who saw the ruins in the 1860s named them for the Aztec emperor Montezuma, in the mistaken belief that he had been connected with their construction.

Lava Beds National Monument in California preserves the stronghold of which tribe's 1872–73 war against the US Army?

The Modoc band led by Kintpuash, known as Captain Jack, held out in a natural lava fortress that now bears his name. The monument also has the largest concentration of lava tubes in North America.

Zion National Park began in 1909 as a national monument under which name, later dropped as locally unpopular?

Mukuntuweap was the name John Wesley Powell gave the canyon in 1872, believing it to be the Paiute name. The Park Service's acting director later proposed Zion, a name used by the local Mormon community.

Which French sculptor designed the copper figure at the heart of Statue of Liberty National Monument?

Frédéric Bartholdi finished the head and the torch-bearing arm before the rest was fully designed, and the pieces were shown at international expositions for publicity.

El Morro National Monument in New Mexico protects a sandstone bluff that early Anglo-American travelers called what?

Inscription Rock carries centuries of signatures, dates and even poems cut by passing travelers. The oldest legible one was left by the Spanish governor Juan de Oñate on April 16, 1605.

Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument in Ohio honors the first Black man to reach which US Army rank?

Colonel Charles Young was also the first Black superintendent of a national park. The monument is the house he bought in 1907 beside Wilberforce University, where he had earlier taught military science.

African Burial Ground National Monument, uncovered in 1991 during federal construction, is in which New York borough?

Manhattan's Civic Center covers part of the largest colonial-era cemetery for people of African descent. Teams removed the remains of 419 people before it became clear the site was too large to excavate fully.

Chiricahua National Monument in Arizona shares its name with a band of which Native American people once led by Cochise?

The Apache band's leader Cochise went to war after the US Army seized and killed some of his relatives in 1861, an episode known as the Bascom Affair.

Freedom Riders National Monument in Alabama includes the former depot of which bus company, attacked by a mob in 1961?

Greyhound's Anniston depot is where a mob slashed tires and smashed windows on a bus carrying black and white riders together. The bus was later set alight six miles away, in a scene caught in a famous photograph.