Five heritage sites you should go out of your way to visit.
Chances are you can quickly tick off the country’s major historic sights: Independence Hall in Philadelphia and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, Bunker Hill in Boston and Jamestown in Virginia. OK, now think of the major scenic national parks— Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon. It isn’t hard to call to mind visuals of such wonders, even without having visited. Bob Sutton, the National Park Service’s chief historian, terms such spots “terribly important” to visit once in a lifetime. “But,” he adds, “our history is not just about the great men who wrote the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. A lot of it came from common people.”
In that spirit, Sutton helped us scour the country for some of the lesser-known historic places where the American narrative was shaped in unique and interesting ways: from a bucolic Pacific prairie where a war very nearly erupted over a farm animal, to the New England bedroom where a future American president was birthed, to an unexpected Chinese apothecary rooted in the heart of Oregon timber land. Places, he says, where “an amazing collection of artifacts has been captured, and people can really get a sense of what life was like way back when.”
Monumental Storm Beacon
It was the longest night of their lives. The wind hissed, the thunder roared and the water froze into icicles just as soon as it sloshed onto the walls of the cabins in which the sailors huddled. The men were certain they’d shiver to death— if the tempestuous waves didn’t swallow them first.
Their boat, the Mataafa steamer, had been chugging across Lake Superior toward Lake Erie with a load of iron ore. But after the skies turned a nastier shade of black and the swells grew gnarly the morning of November 28, 1905, Captain R.F. Humble had turned the 430-foot-long steamer around and headed back to Duluth, Minn. When he reached the harbor’s edge that afternoon, waves tossed the boat into a pier. The Mataafa flung around broadside, flailing and helpless, and its lifeboats were swept away.
Meanwhile, on shore, what seemed to be half the population of Duluth stood by in horror. “Thinking men and women gasped every time a wave broke over the doomed vessel,” the Duluth Evening Herald reported, “and groans could be heard when she would be seen to shrink like a human being.” Then the ship’s stern began to sink. As night fell, monstrous walls of water prevented a harbor lifesaving crew from reaching the steamer and, aghast, onlookers watched some of Mataafa’s sailors make a run for the steamer’s bow. One… two…then three—they were alive! A fourth man was hurled back to the stern a trio of times. He gave up.
The Mataafa Storm, as it came to be called, is the worst that the Great Lakes has ever witnessed. All told, the three-day squall damaged or destroyed 29 ships. When the lifesavers finally reached the Mataafa on the morning of November 29, they found 15 men at the bow, all numb but alive. The nine sailors at the stern were dead.
A delegation of ship owners subsequently descended upon Washington, and in early 1907 Congress appropriated $75,000 to build a cliff-top lighthouse in the small town of Beaver Bay, Minn. The Split Rock Lighthouse, completed in 1910, remained operational until 1969, when modern navigational equipment made it obsolete. Today you can climb the tower and examine the original lighthouse lens, along with the hand-operated clockworks that caretakers still crank several times a day to make the light flash. Exhibits inside the lighthouse chronicle the Mataafa Storm. A catwalk at the edge of the 110-foot high cliff offers sweeping views of Lake Superior, including a bird’s-eye perspective of the remains of the Madeira, one of the steamers that went down in the storm and is now a popular scuba diving site.
Gold Mountain Apothecary
If you blink as you drive through John Day, Oregon (pop. 1,850), which is nestled in a timber-rich area between the Strawberry Mountains and the Blue Mountains, you’ll likely miss the Kam Wah Chung & Co. Museum. The squat trading post was carved largely from stone in 1876 and capped with a wooden attic sturdy enough to provide some protection from passing cowboys who liked to shoot the place up for fun. To Ing Hay and Lung On, who arrived around 1885, the bric-a-brac structure looked perfect for their purposes. Flush with Chinese miners who had left their wives, children and war torn homeland in search of a “gold mountain,” John Day was the site of the second largest Chinatown in America. “Hay and On came to mine the miners,” says Christina Sweet, a curator at the museum.
Hay, a skilled acupuncturist and herbalist, installed an apothecary at Kam Wah Chung (translation: Golden Flower of Prosperity) and treated miners for sepsis, lockjaw and sore muscles. On, who spoke English better than others fresh off the boat, established a grocery and acted as a go between for his countrymen with potential employers and the law. In the evenings, Hay and On, who also lived in the 800-square-foot building, opened their doors for music and gambling. “Chinatown was separated from the main part of John Day, where the Chinese weren’t allowed,” says Sweet. “So Kam Wah Chung became a home away from home.” For a spell, anyway. By 1900, the local gold mines had been depleted, and the Chinese miners followed their American counterparts out of town. But “Doc” Hay, whose healing touch was prized by white women, and Lung “Leon” On, whose access to tobacco and liquor made him popular with white men, stayed on. The doors to Kam Wah Chung were shut when Hay died in 1952, having outlived On by 12 years.
Even though the town was awarded ownership of the building a few years later, it was abandoned until some local officials got around to inspecting the musty premises in 1966. The apothecary was completely untouched, with all 500 of Doc Hay’s bear claws, Jerusalem crickets and herbal remedies stowed in cigar boxes, and his Chinese slippers arranged by the bed where his bowler hat lay. Under the bed, the officials found $23,000 in uncashed checks for services the good doctor rendered during the Depression.
Today you can weave in and around the 60,000 objects and curios Doc Hay left behind. “I call it a time capsule,” says Sweet. “There are no Chinese out here anymore. And if you look around there is nothing else to show that they were here. This is one of the last spots that shows they did so much work in the West.”
Louisiana Lush Life
Union troops came blazing into central Louisiana’s Cane River region in April 1864, ready to torch its cotton fields. At Magnolia Plantation, an overseer named Mr. Miller tried to halt their assault. As legend has it, he cajoled, he bartered and he even talked the soldiers into a gambling match. But then a fight broke out. The Northerners capped Mr. Miller not far from the front porch of the main house and burned the building to the ground.
Magnolia’s “Big House” was rebuilt in the 1880s and is still occupied by a family that can trace its roots all the way back to Jean Baptiste LeComte II, who acquired the surrounding property through French and Spanish land grants in the mid- 1700s. Nowadays, Magnolia Plantation is part of the 207-acre Cane River Creole National Historical Park, which includes the neighboring Oakland Plantation. Magnolia’s Big House is normally closed to the general public, but you are welcome to tour the unoccupied Oakland Big House, with its rich furnishings and imported European art, as well as 65 other landmark structures on both plantations, all of which evokes an era when the nearby Cane River was a thoroughfare for cotton and other cash crops headed for New Orleans.
Prior to the Civil War era, thousands of black slaves at the Magnolia and Oakland plantations picked cotton for white planters descended from French colonials while Creoles of mixed heritage toiled in more skilled positions. The slaves lived in sturdy brick buildings that have survived until today and are a far cry from the small huts with dirt floors that were common on other plantations. You can examine voodoo artifacts some of the inhabitants left behind. You can also peer into the plantation store, where sharecropping farmers exchanged plantation currency for durable goods.
The most unique structure at the park is an 1850s cotton gin—the only one of its kind still in its original location—where a pack of mules once powered the massive contraption’s screw-press in order to bale 500 pounds of cotton at a time. In addition to the gin itself, you can examine production ledgers that include line items that show, for example, how a pregnant woman picked several hundred pounds of cotton in a day.
On fall harvest days, Mr. Miller would have maneuvered throughout the Magnolia grounds and the thrumming voices that belted out the “Cane River Blues”—Oh Green Corn…dry corn…corn in a demijohn…best drink I ever had…get it outta demijohn… Green Corn—and other slave work songs. His responsibilities were many and his sense of ownership over the place, even though only symbolic, no doubt propelled his last stand of loyalty in the face of the Union Army. To this day, when something goes missing at Magnolia, folks laughingly conclude, “Mr. Miller has it.”
Peaceable Kingdom
The first time a British pig came to root in his garden, Lyman Cutlar merely lost his temper. But when the swine returned on June 15, 1859, the feisty American farm boy grabbed his gun and triggered an international incident later dubbed “The Pig War” on San Juan Island, part of a 450- island archipelago between Vancouver Island and what was Washington Territory.
Today San Juan Island National Historical Park is a nature lover’s paradise, where you might catch a glimpse of Orca whales while walking on the beach or spy bald eagles while ambling in the forest. You can also tour military camps set up by the United States and Great Britain as the two nations pulled out their big guns during the Pig War.
When the U.S. and Great Britain signed the 1846 Treaty of Oregon, ownership of the archipelago was not resolved, but no one seemed to care much until England’s Hudson’s Bay Company established the Belle Vue Sheep Farm on San Juan Island in 1853. Angered by the incursion, an American revenuer soon journeyed from the mainland to collect taxes from Hudson’s Bay. But the attempt was a non-starter. So in March 1855, a Washington Territory sheriff dispatched his men to the island to round up 34 breeding rams as back taxes—in the dead of night. As the law made off with the rams, a Hudson’s Bay business agent ran to the shore and demanded that they cease and desist. Instead, the Americans pulled their pistols on the Brit. “This goes all the way up to the desk of the president,” says National Park Service historian Mike Vouri. “And for a time, an uneasy truce ensues.”
By 1859, a clutch of Americans set up homesteads on the land where Hudson’s Bay grazed its sheep and kept a few swine. Lyman Cutlar was one of the squatters. When word reached Hudson’s Bay that Cutlar had killed one of their pigs, the Brits threatened to arrest him. So U.S. Army Captain George Pickett rushed to San Juan with a 64-man infantry unit. The Brits then sent in the Royal Navy, 400 marines strong, with orders to shoot if Pickett refused to back down. But Marine Admiral Lambert Baynes balked at the orders, saying he refused to lose one man over such a ridiculous situation. Soon Pickett’s troops numbered 461. Still, not a shot rang out.
As both sides waited for word of the standoff to reach Washington, D.C., the drama turned comical. The Brits went ashore for whiskey and cigars with their enemy and the Americans attended Sunday services on the warships. Finally, President James Buchanan sent General Winfield Scott to settle the matter. He arrived in October 1859 via ship—which he never left, arbitrating with the British governor on Vancouver Island via messenger. Within a week, each country stood down, leaving one military company apiece on San Juan Island.
The joint occupation lasted 13 years, until 1872, when an international panel ruled that the archipelago belonged to the U.S. Today, military relics, including dugouts where the Americans set up artillery, help the Park Service spread a message of nonviolence. “By God, a war didn’t happen here. Peace happened here,” says Vouri. “Nobody was killed— except a pig!”
Cradle of Camelot
He was a bank president. She, a daughter of politics. Newly married, ambitious and above all independent, they alit from their extended clans for the Boston suburbs with deliberate intentions: to start their own family in a bedroom community with good schools and a respectable Catholic church. In 1914, Joseph P. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy made a home for themselves at 83 Beals Street in up-and-coming Brookline, Mass.
Today the John Fitzgerald Kennedy National Historic Site, run by the National Park Service, is the only presidential birthplace set up by a first mother for ongoing tours. The Kennedys re-purchased the house in 1966, after JFK’s assassination. Rose spent the next three years re-creating her newlywed home with some of its original furnishings: wedding gifts of Irish crystal and a grand piano; the children’s monogrammed porringers and silver napkin rings; their baby bassinet and christening dress, and—yes, the modest twin bed in which Rose birthed the president.
The two-and-a-half-story house, with its nine rooms, was an impressive starter home. The Kennedys further distinguished themselves from neighbors by installing not one but two telephones, and hiring a pair of live-in housemaids. Their first son, Joe, was born while the couple summered away from Brookline, but the next three Kennedy kids made their entrance in the master bedroom. On May 29, 1917, at 3 p.m., the 35th American president arrived amidst Irish linen embroidered with shamrocks and thistles. “When you hold your baby in your arms for the first time and you think of all the things you can say and do to influence him, it’s a tremendous responsibility,” Rose recalled in a recorded house tour narrative. “What you do with him and for him can influence not only him, but everyone he meets and not for a day or a month or a year but for time and eternity.”
Rose kept her young brood occupied mostly with books, including little Jack’s favorite, King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table. Every day when the cook began to prep dinner, she strolled with the kids to Saint Aidan’s Church to show them that God wasn’t just for Sunday, she said. In the evening the family retired to the most important place in the house: the dining room. Never knowing when they may be called upon, the kids were expected to say grace or to talk about Gospel lessons they heard in church.
After the family moved to a larger Brookline home, the family traditions established on Beals Street continued. “Rose Kennedy really used her home as a school,” says Jim Roberts, a National Park Service ranger. When the Kennedy clan matriarch later prepared 83 Beals Street for public display, she used it as a school yet again. “I often ask people to think about what may have been going through her mind at the time that she was setting it up, because the family that lived there really didn’t exist anymore,” says Roberts. “All four children [who resided] in the house suffered some tragedy, and her husband has had a stroke by this time. Rose was the only one left to tell their story.”
Mrs. Kennedy’s memories of that early era were uplifting. “We were very happy here,” she said in the tour, “and although we did not know about the days ahead we were enthusiastic and optimistic about the future.”
Kristen Hinman is a freelance journalist in Washington, D.C.
Originally published in the August 2011 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.
