18 Lesser Known Historic Sites in the United States that We’ve All Been Missing Out On

1. The Allegheny Portage Railroad in western Pennsylvania

In its heyday during the middle of the nineteenth century, the Allegheny Portage railroad was considered an engineering marvel, built to haul canal passengers, cargoes, and eventually the canal barges themselves over the Allegheny Mountains between disconnected branches of the Pennsylvania canal. Innovations developed in support of the portage included wire rope, engineered by John Roebling and later used to build suspension bridges over the Ohio River and eventually to connect Brooklyn with Manhattan. Both stationary steam engines and animal power were used to haul the loads up and down the slopes which separated the canals, and the first railroad tunnel in the United States – Staple Bend Tunnel – was a part of the system. Following his first American tour Charles Dickens wrote memorably of the system and the boats which were part of the journey in his American Notes.

Before the canal and connecting railroads was in existence a journey from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh was measured in weeks for a typical traveler. Its completion lessened the time to travel between Pennsylvania’s primary cities to four days. Nonetheless the technology which made the portage successful – the steam engine – was also its nemesis, once railroads connected the cities the time to travel between them was less than a day, and the canal gradually fell into disuse, as did canals across the United States. The National Park Service maintains part of the site as a National Historic Site and includes the Lemon House Tavern, which was a popular watering hole among the travelers and workers at the portage.

2. Salem Maritime National Historic Site in Salem, Massachusetts

Salem Massachusetts is most widely renowned for its difficulties with witches and warlocks in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. What is less well known is that at the time of the first census of the United States, Salem was the sixth largest city in the nation, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century it was world famous as a shipping port. Ships from Salem traded around the world, to the Spice Islands of the far Pacific from which they brought pepper home to the United States. Chinese tea was exchanged for American products via ships from Salem, New England codfish was shipped to Europe, salted and dried. Salem ships also participated in the Atlantic triangle trade, which included the shipment of slaves to the American South and the Caribbean islands.

Shipping of spices from the Pacific was so crucial to the town that its seal includes a depiction of pepper from Sumatra. The first shipload of Sumatran pepper brought to Salem delivered a profit of more than 700% to the vessel’s owners. As ships grew larger and their drafts deeper, the relatively shallow harbor became unable to accommodate them, and the great shipping industry of Salem went into steady decline, no longer able to compete with the deep harbors of New York, Boston, and Baltimore. The city became a manufacturing center for a time, which also declined in the early twentieth century. By the end of the twentieth century Salem’s primary industry was tourism, focused largely on the town’s association with witchcraft, though its maritime history is well represented by the Maritime National Historic Site.

3. Huffman Prairie in Ohio is where the Wright brothers learned how to fly

Following their first successful powered flights at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina in December of 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright returned to their home town of Dayton, Ohio to learn how to master the techniques of controlled flight. An empty field outside of Dayton known as Huffman Prairie, natural grassland used for the grazing of cattle, was an ideal location for their experiments. After obtaining permission of the owner the brothers commuted from their Dayton home to the field using the interurban. A hangar for the airplane and a system used to catapult it into flight were erected on the property. The brothers made well over 100 flights over the property, which was secluded enough for them to perform their experiments in relative secrecy.

By 1910 the brothers were operating the Wright Flying School on the property, training future aviators as pilots. Among them was Henry Arnold, known as Hap Arnold, who commanded the United States Army Air Corps, and later Army Air Forces, during the Second World War. Another student was Marjorie Stinson, who became the first female airmail pilot in the United States. Huffman Prairie is physically located within the grounds of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, though it has separate entrances and is secured from the rest of the base, making it accessible to visitors. Replicas of the Wright’s hangar and catapult are on display. The little known site is part of the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historic Park, established in 1992.

4. Rapidan Camp in Northern Virginia is also known as Camp Hoover, in honor of its builder

Herbert Hoover wanted a retreat near Washington to which he could escape the pressures of his office, and he used his own money to purchase the land and erect the presidential retreat at Camp Rapidan near Syria, Virginia, in 1929. A former mine engineer who had often lived in western mining camps, Hoover appreciated both the isolation of a camp environment and the opportunity to indulge in one of his favorite pastimes, fishing. The site selected, where the Mill Prong and the Laurel Prong join together forming the Rapidan River offered excellent trout fishing and the isolation which the new president sought, and his wife Lou did much of the design of the camp’s layout, as well as the interiors of the buildings. The Hoovers used the camp throughout his one term presidency, and entertained foreign dignitaries there.

When Franklin Roosevelt took office he found the difficulties of reaching the camp and moving within it from the confines of his wheelchair made it inconvenient. Roosevelt had another camp opened in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland, which he called Shangri La and which is now known as Camp David. Rapidan Camp declined over the years, though much of it has been restored to its appearance when Hoover was president. It is still difficult to reach, vehicles aren’t allowed (including bicycles) and the wood paths are over somewhat difficult terrain. The camp is now a part of the Shenandoah National Park, and open to visitors willing to make the trek. The camp was and is so remote that during Hoover’s visits, mail and other documents required by the president or his visitors were dropped to the site from airplanes flying overhead.

5. The Carrie Nation house in Medicine Lodge, Kansas

It was while residing in the house located on Fowler Street in Medicine Lodge, Kansas that Carrie Nation had a divine vision of herself smashing up saloons in nearby Kiowa, the opening blows of her career against the sin of drunkenness. She did not use an axe in her first sortie against saloons, rather she equipped herself with large rocks to smash the saloon’s bottles and kegs. A tornado in eastern Kansas shortly following her attack on her first three saloons was perceived by her to be an indication of divine approval of her efforts. Her assaults, which began in June, 1900, led to her husband suggesting that she would be able to destroy saloons and their stock more efficiently if she used an axe, rather than waste time seeking rocks of suitable size. She agreed. Two years later they divorced.

Over the course of the next ten years Carrie found herself arrested more than 30 time for her efforts, which she referred to as hatchetations and which were often accompanied by temperance supporters singing hymns while she whaled away with her axe. By the time Nation had achieved international notoriety she no longer resided in the home in Medicine Lodge. It is noted as the site from which her career as a saloon wrecker began, where she had the vision of herself as a “bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn’t like”. Presumably Jesus would not have invited her to the wedding at Cana, where He performed the first of many miracles according to the gospels, the conversion of water into wine.

6. The Union Stock Yard Gate in Chicago is a National Historic Landmark

All that remains of the Union Stock Yard in Chicago is the stone gate which was erected in 1879. It marked the entry to the meat processing district which made Chicago the largest meatpacking center in the world at the turn of the twentieth century. Seven decades later the famed stockyards closed. What is largely forgotten is that the stockyards were built, not by the meatpackers as is often assumed, but by the railroads. It grew to encompass 475 acres of land, and employed 45,000 people at its peak, butchering more than 400 million animals between the end of the American Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century. The stockyards gave rise to American meatpacking giants such as Armour and Swift, and helped launch other industries as well.

Leather, soap, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, gelatins, and other products were all manufactured from the byproducts of the meatpacking industry, which also built the industrial might of the railroads. Following the Second World War advances in the trucking industry, including refrigerated trailers, made it cheaper to butcher animals regionally than ship them live to a central location for butchering and then ship them again to markets as beef, pork, and lamb. By the 1960s both Swift and Armour had abandoned their operations and in 1971 the stockyards were closed. They were demolished beginning later that year, a process which took eight months to complete. Only the stone gate remains to mark a major portion of the history of Chicago and the development of industry in the United States.

7. The Delta Queen is a National Historic Landmark, scheduled to resume cruising America’s rivers

The Delta Queen is a stern mounted paddle-wheel riverboat, built in California in 1927 to operate between Sacramento and San Francisco. In 1946, after the vessel served as a water ambulance transferring wounded from hospital ships to San Francisco hospitals during World War II, it was towed through the Panama Canal, up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers to Pittsburgh, and renovated for service on the aforementioned rivers as well as the Tennessee and Cumberland. In the 1960s changes to the law made the operation of the Delta Queen as a passenger steamer illegal unless it was granted a congressional exemption, which it was several times over the years, allowing it to continue to operate until 2008.

Since that time the vessel was used for several purposes, including as a floating hotel in Chattanooga. Efforts by various groups to restore the steamboat to operation as an excursion vessel reached a climax in November 2018, when the House of Representatives granted an exemption from the Safety at Sea law which had prevented the Delta Queen from carrying passengers due to its construction not being of flame retardant materials. Besides being itself the sole surviving paddle-wheel steamer on America’s rivers, the Delta Queen also carries a steam calliope, which was used to play as the boat was docking and undocking at its various ports of call. It was typical of the Delta Queen when approaching its dock at Cincinnati or Marietta to entertain those watching with a rendition of Beautiful Ohio.

8. The Pillsbury A mill in Minneapolis is a National Historic Landmark in Minneapolis

When it was opened in 1881 after more than a year of construction and half a decade of planning which preceded it, the Pillsbury A mill was the largest in the world in terms of milling capacity. Typical mills of the day were capable of producing about 500 barrels per day. The Pillsbury mill was designed to produce 5,000 barrels per day, though it did not run at full capacity for many years after its opening. It was the first of many mills which were designed to operate at what had been unheard of levels, and because of the vibration of the milling machinery the walls of the building required reinforcement over the years. Nonetheless the walls bow inward at the top of the building, with a deviation of more than twenty inches. The stone walls of the building are load bearing, and after the walls were completed they were reinforced with wooden timbers on the inside of the building.

Each of the building’s seven floors and its basement had a unique function which contributed to the mill’s operation. The mill was driven by a pair of waterwheels which were in turn driven by the Mississippi River along which it was built. Combined the waterwheels provided 2,400 horsepower to drive the machinery of the mill. Pillsbury operated the mill for its intended purpose until 2003, when it closed the facility. By then Pillsbury had been bought by Diageo, and it was later sold to General Mills. The giant mill building was acquired by local developers and converted to use as lofts in the early twenty-first century. The waterwheels were replaced with hydro-electric turbines which generate three quarters of the building’s electrical requirements.

9. The Little White Schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin was the birthplace of the Republican Party

In the 1850s the Democratic Party was the largest of the American political parties, followed by the declining Whig Party, the Free Soil party, and several smaller regional parties. The dominant political issue of 1854 was the Kansas-Nebraska bill, which was supported by the Democrats and fervently opposed by the Whigs and Free Soil Party. At issue was whether the territories of Kansas and Nebraska were to allow slavery, with the supporters of popular sovereignty arguing that the voters of the territories themselves were to be allowed to decide. Opponents wanted slavery to be kept out of the territories. In Ripon, Wisconsin, a local politician named Alvan Bovay led the opposition to the bill.

Bovay found opponents to the allowing of the territories to decide the issue of slavery themselves within several contending political groups and called them together at a meeting in the small schoolhouse which he had himself led the effort to have built. At the meeting it was decided that the local Whig and Free Soil parties were united in a new party, which they named the Republican Party, and welcomed also local Democrats and others who agreed with their view. Bovay used his New York connections (he was a transplanted New Yorker) to garner publicity from New York newspapers, particularly the New York Tribune, and other local chapters developed around the country. By 1856 it was a national party, and four years later it won control of both houses of Congress and the White House when Abraham Lincoln was elected as President of the United States.

10. The Maggie L. Walker Historical Site in Richmond, Virginia

Maggie L. Walker was born in in 1867, the daughter of a former slave according to her own biographical information she provided later in life. Other documentation places her birth as occurring in 1864, when her mother was serving as a cook in the Richmond home of Elizabeth Van Lew. Maggie was a grade school teacher in Richmond when she married a bricklayer by the name of Armistead Walker. Maggie began a lifelong association with the Independent Order of St. Luke, a charity which promoted humanitarian causes as well as care for those unable to care for themselves. In the early 1900s she launched a newspaper on behalf of the organization and shortly after the newspaper began publication she chartered St. Luke Penny Savings Bank.

Maggie was president of the bank, making her the first African-American woman to charter a bank in the United States. When the bank merged with other Richmond banks to form Consolidated Bank and Trust Company she served as the chair of the board of directors for the new bank. Maggie died in 1934, after several years of being confined to a wheelchair, which had led her to be an early advocate in the United States for Americans with disabilities. Her office within the St. Luke Building in Richmond was maintained as it was on the day she died. Her home, in the Jackson Ward area of Richmond is maintained by the National Park Service as a National Historic Site, restored and furnished to appear as it did when she lived there.

11. There are two National Historic Sites dedicated to the visual arts

The National Park Service maintains two historic sites which are dedicated to the visual arts (out of 88 places designated as National Historic Sites). Both are located in New England, Saint-Gaudens in Cornish, New Hampshire and Weir Farm in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Saint-Gaudens was the summer home and later permanent residence of Auguste Saint-Gaudens, a major American sculptor in the late nineteenth century. Many of his works are equestrian monuments to Civil War officers, including the statue of William Tecumseh Sherman in New York’s Central Park and the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial which is featured on Boston Common. His statue known as Standing Lincoln, which towers twelve feet high, is featured in Chicago’s Lincoln Park.

Weir farm in Connecticut maintains an artist-in-residence program (as does Saint-Gaudens) and has hosted aspiring artists in numbers well into the hundreds. It is named for American artist J. Alden Weir, who purchased the 153 acre farm in exchange for a painting and $10 in 1882. Weir and other artists in residence on the property painted numerous landscapes of the Connecticut countryside, and the farm continued to host artists for decades following Weir’s death in 1919. Paintings by J. Alden Weir are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, and other prestigious collections in the United States. Today 60 acres are dedicated to American art and recreation with hiking trails among the sixteen buildings which are preserved, with some serving as working studios.

12. The Chalmette battlefield, site of the Battle of New Orleans, is preserved within a site named for a pirate and smuggler

Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve is named for the notorious smuggler and pirate who operated a base manned by like-minded outlaws from Baritaria during the years before and including the War of 1812. Offered a pardon by the British in exchange for his services guiding the British Army and fleet through the bayous and swamps which comprise most of the park and preserve, Lafitte instead offered his support to the Americans under Andrew Jackson. The actual amount of support provided is disputed by historians, with much of it romanticized over the years, and following the war Lafitte returned to smuggling and piracy, operating out of Galveston in what was then Spanish Mexico. How and where he met his end is open to speculation. Most historians believe he died from wounds sustained in battle with the Spanish near Honduras.

The battlefield at Chalmette, which was where the Battle of New Orleans took place in January 1815, after the treaty which ended the War of 1812 had been signed, is included within the park and preserve. It was there that the United States defeated the British veterans of the Napoleonic Wars. Among the dead was British Major General Edward Pakenham, himself a veteran of the Peninsular War in Spain and the brother in law of the Duke of Wellington. As had Lord Nelson a more than a decade earlier, Pakenham was returned to England in a cask of rum. Wellington blamed his death on the naval leader of the expedition, Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, whom the Iron Duke believed was lax in the execution of his duties.

13. Fort Necessity National Battlefield in western Pennsylvania

Fort Necessity was built by the Virginia militia, out of what it was named for, by the commander of the militia, a then unknown young Virginia surveyor named George Washington. The fort was a hastily built wooden palisade, erected to protect the militia’s supplies as a larger force of French and their Indian allies approached. Washington erected the palisade to protect the supplies from those of his men he believed may be prone to desert, guarded by British regulars. Washington ordered trenches dug outside the palisade for the protection of the troops, but heavy rains in late June and early July rendered them unusable. Meanwhile French troops approached the fortification using the road which had been built by Washington’s men.

In the end Washington was presented a surrender document written in French, which he could not read, and he signed it without realizing that he had admitted his men had assassinated a French officer in a confrontation earlier in the spring. Washington and his men were allowed to withdraw back to Virginia, and the young colonel of militia was then a household name. Fort Necessity was the first battle of what became the Seven Years War, a global conflict by the time it ended in 1763. Washington’s reputation would be enhanced in yet another defeat at the Monongahela in 1755. By the end of what is known in America as the French and Indian War he was known as America’s foremost soldier, despite having achieved little success in battle.

14. The Martin Van Buren National Historic Site honors an American president who spoke Dutch as his first language

Martin Van Buren was the eighth president of the United States, raised in Kinderhook, New York by Dutch speaking parents, and did not learn English until he attended school. Van Buren remains to date the only American president for whom English was a second language. He first entered national politics as a Senator during the administration of President James Monroe and quickly became adept at political maneuvering. Van Buren was elected governor of New York in 1828, though he served in that position for a mere forty-three days before resigning to serve as Andrew Jackson’s Secretary of State. His remains the shortest term of any New York governor. He later served as Ambassador to Britain and as Jackson’s Vice President during his second term.

Van Buren was Jackson’s appointed successor, and he won the presidency convincingly, though his single term in office is largely forgotten. He ran for president twice more, using his Kinderhook estate he named Lindenwald to direct his campaigns. Neither was successful. The 36 room mansion and surrounding farm became his retirement home, and is today preserved as it was during his time there in the antebellum period. Van Buren died there and is buried on the estate. The site offers guided tours of parts of the mansion only. As for the use of English as a second language, the name of the estate, Lindenwald, is a German word meaning Linden forest, for the trees which line the unpaved road which approaches the estate.

15. John Muir National Historic Site

The John Muir National Historic Site honors one of the founders and leading proponents of the National Park System, a co-founder of the Sierra Club, and the driving force behind the creation of several national parks and historic sites. John Muir was a business partner of his father-in-law, managing the latter’s fruit orchards, and a leading conservationist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The historic site consists of the house in which Muir resided and the nearby Mount Wanda Nature Preserve, which was named for one of Muir’s daughters. Muir wrote newspaper and magazine articles and numerous books extolling conservation of public lands while residing in the house.

Muir was one of the first and most vocal supporters of the drive to create Yosemite National Park through an act of Congress in 1890. In 1867 Muir walked from Kentucky to Florida, using no prepared path or trail, and instead sought the least traveled route he could find. He later documented the hike in a book he entitled A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf. As a co-founder of the Sierra Club he was instrumental in the creation of what became America’s National Forests. He once camped in the open air with Theodore Roosevelt, an event which both men remembered as life changing. His mind was such that he memorized the entire New Testament and a large portion of the Old Testament as well. The John Muir National Historic Site is in Martinez, in the San Francisco area of California.

16. Fort Raleigh National Historic Site contains the site of the first English settlement in America

The Roanoke Colony was established by English investors, among them Sir Walter Raleigh, in 1587, two decades before the establishment of the Virginia Colony at Jamestown. Although Raleigh never traveled to the colony he was a leading supporter of it, and his failure to dispatch relief expeditions is a likely cause of the colony vanishing, its fate never ascertained with certainty. There has never been any archaeological finding which points to a specific fate, and anecdotal evidence provided via oral histories is likewise inconclusive. During the American Civil War the Union Army took possession of the island off the North Carolina coast, and held it from 1862 to the end of the war. Runaway slaves were sheltered there, and in 1863 a Freedmen’s Colony was created.

The site is near two other National Sites, the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kitty Hawk, where the brothers tested kites and first achieved powered heavier than air flight, and the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. Fort Raleigh has been the site of an outdoor play entitled The Lost Colony which has been performed almost continuously since 1937, though suspended during the Second World War. The play is performed in an amphitheater built on the site of the original lost colony, and depicts what its writer believed life to have been like in the colony. In truth, after the departure of the original ships to England, no clue of what happened to the 115 colonists, including how long they survived, has ever been found. The settlement still stood in 1590, but the colonists were lost to history.

17. The First Ladies National Historic Site is dedicated to all of America’s First Ladies

In 2000 the First Ladies National Historic Site was established in the former home of Ida Saxton McKinley in Canton, Ohio. A second building, formerly the City National Bank built in 1895, was established as an Education and Research center, dedicated to the preservation of the papers and other memorabilia of the wives of America’s presidents. Although the several extant Presidential Libraries contain much of the materials representative of the wives of the respective presidents, including in some cases whole wings dedicated to the purpose, the Canton facility is the only one dedicated to all of America’s First Ladies. The Saxton McKinley home is dedicated to the family that lived there, rather than containing materials relevant to all of the First Ladies, some of which can be found in the Education and Research Center.

Both facilities are administered by the First Ladies Library, which was established in 1996, largely through the efforts of Mary Regula, the wife of an Ohio congressman. The library maintains online courses discussing the various First Ladies and their role within their husband’s administrations. According to the library’s website the lesson plans were prepared by educators from Kent State University in Ohio. The website also has a blog, which as of December 2018 had not been updated for more than two years. It should be noted that most of the correspondence between George and Martha Washington, as well as Thomas and Martha Jefferson, were destroyed by the surviving spouse, a fate which befell many of the papers of the earlier First Ladies. The First Ladies site has struggled to find an audience according to Canton news sites, and beyond the area is not well known.

18. There is only one unit of the National Park Service in the State of Vermont

Vermont, one of the smallest states, contains only one unit of the National Park Service, and makes up for the lack of others by giving it multiple names. The Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park is a site where one owner, Frederick Billings, built his dairy farm, just outside the village of Woodstock, Vermont. The remainder of the site contains a conservation district of long standing. The main feature of the site is the George Marsh (considered America’s first conservationist) boyhood home which was later the home of Billings, who had read Marsh’s works on forest management and decided to put them into practice at his estate.

The forest enclosed in the site is probably the oldest managed forest in the United States, with the possible exception of some of the grounds on Mount Vernon, where Washington practiced early forest management. He was marking trees for cutting on the day he developed the illness from which he died. But after Washington’s death the practice was abandoned as Mount Vernon fell into decline. Laurence Rockefeller continued the practice at the Vermont site when he acquired it, and the National Park Service has continued it since they acquired the property, making it continuously managed since 1869. By the way, there is one other footprint from the National Park Service in Vermont. About 150 miles of the Appalachian Trail cross the state, with a change in elevation from 400 to 4010 feet.

Where do we find this stuff? Here are our sources:

“Allegheny Portage Railroad National Historical Site: An engineering marvel”. Teresa F. Lindeman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. April 19, 2016

“Salem Maritime National Historic Site. History and Culture”. National Park Service. Online

“Wright Brothers on Huffman Prairie”. Film, available at the Internet Archive. March 7, 1988

“Where the President Puts Care Aside: Informality Rules at Rapidan Camp”. Mary Hornaday, The New York Times. June 12, 1932

“The Use and Need of the Life of Carry (sic) A. Nation”. Carry Amelia Nation. 1908. (2006)

“Livestock Hotels: America’s Historic Stockyards”. J’Nell L. Pate. 2005

“Mill City: A Visual History of the Minneapolis Mill District”. Shannon M. Pennefeather. 2003

“The Little White Schoolhouse: Our History”. Official Web Site. Online

“Determined Spirit”. Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site, National Park Service. Online

“Guide to the Saint-Gaudens Estate in Cornish New Hampshire”. George Kelly, New Hampshire Magazine. June 2013

“Chalmette Battlefield”. Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve. National Park Service. Online

“A Few Acres of Snow: The Saga of the French and Indian Wars”. Robert Leckie. 2006

“Martin Van Buren National Historic Site” National Park Service. Online

“John Muir Exhibit”. The Sierra Club’s John Muir Education Team. Online

“Fort Raleigh National Historic Site”. Outer Banks Visitor Guide. 2016. Online

“First Ladies National Historic Site Struggles to Attract Visitors”. Bob Janiskee, National Parks Traveler. October 11, 2008

“History and Culture”. Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park. National Park Service. Online