The Battlefield Parks and the National Park System

Keywords: National parks, battlefields, monuments
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 64

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century the U.S. Army began buying and preserving Civil War battlefields, eventually developing a substantial park system. The National park Service took over these sites in 1933 and integrated them into the national park system. Geography was fundamental to this merger and the place of these places in the park system. The Park Service sought their acquisition to move the park system eastwards, bringing it closer to the majority of the country’s population and congressional districts. Second, these places were filtered by area, with larger units, such as Chickamauga and Chattanooga, relatively easily assimilated into the park system. These had museums, park roads and drives, and a cultural landscape complete with plaques and memorials to the events that took place there. Many army units were quite small; the army had developed a system for marking large battlefields with a set of small places; these were significantly expanded and developed as regular parks, leaving only two unaltered. The remaining small memorial sites were cut from the park system and turned over to local control. This paper will examine these geographic strategies and their impacts on the park system, as well as interesting parallels to the geography of protected areas in the United States today.