America’s 250th anniversary is approaching, but the places that hold the nation’s most contested histories are facing fresh pressure.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation released its annual list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places on Wednesday, highlighting sites connected to equality, civil rights, Indigenous lands, LGBTQ+ history, and Japanese American incarceration. The list arrives as federal policy, development, neglect, and funding gaps converge around places that document how the country has struggled to live up to its founding ideals.
Among the most closely watched sites is Stonewall National Monument in New York City, where recent federal actions have affected the representation of transgender history. The President’s House in Philadelphia is also on the list after panels about slavery and the nine people enslaved by George Washington were removed in January. Many of those panels were later reinstalled after a lawsuit, but digital replacement images released by the National Park Service soften the references to slavery.
The Greater Chaco Cultural Landscape, spanning New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and Utah, faces a different threat: the possible rollback of protections that have limited oil and gas development near ancestral Pueblo and Hopi lands. The public lands in question sit within a ten-mile radius of the prehistoric archaeological sites at Chaco Culture National Historical Park.
Other endangered places show how varied the preservation crisis has become. The Tule Lake Segregation Center in California’s Modoc County, where Japanese Americans who protested race-based incarceration were held in a maximum-security prison, has only 37 protected acres out of 1,100. In Ruidosa, Texas, El Corazón Sagrado de la Iglesia de Jesús, built in 1915 for Mexican and Mexican American farmers, is threatened by a proposed border wall. The long-vacant Ben Moore Hotel in Montgomery, Alabama, has also been vulnerable, though the Conservation Fund has acquired it after it was at risk of demolition.
Each site on this year’s list will receive a one-time $25,000 grant. The National Trust’s endangered places program, which began in 1988, has now identified more than 350 sites. As the semiquincentennial nears, the list underscores a larger question: which histories will be preserved in public view, and which will be allowed to fade?
