From National Parks

March 3, 2016

Carl Sandburg National Historic Site

On our adventure day this week, Tom and I visited the Carl Sandburg National Historic Site in Hendersonville, North Carolina. Carl Sandburg wrote a six volume biography of Abraham Lincoln, won three Pulitzer Prizes, and published 156 books. But I learned all that yesterday. Before yesterday I would have said that Carl Sandburg wrote “Fog,” …

February 11, 2016

Kings Mountain National Recreation Trail

After listening to several more people who got lost on their way out of Kings Mountain State Park over the weekend, Tom and I decided to take a hike from there to see what the trouble was. We drove to Crawford Lake at Kings Mountain State Park, found the trailhead, and headed out. The Kings …

February 10, 2016

Black History Month

As I’m sure you already know, February is Black History Month. I really enjoy learning new things about black history; minorities are certainly under-represented in history books. The Revolutionary War had many blacks – free and slave – fighting. One of our projects at work was putting together a temporary display showing some of the …

January 22, 2016

Loyalists and Patriots

In the second installment of “Revolutionary War in a Nutshell” we are going to think about how the two sides are labeled: Loyalists and Patriots. I had always thought of the Revolutionary War in terms of British and Americans, but I realized that most of the people fighting on both sides were Americans. There were …

January 19, 2016

235th Anniversary

I had never been to a 235th Anniversary celebration before Saturday. As part of our job here at King’s Mountain National Military Park, Tom and I got to go to the Battle of Cowpens’ 235th Anniversary celebration on Saturday. We were able to take pictures and video of the National Park Service cannon crew as …

January 13, 2016

Working at King’s Mountain

I have been trying to decide how to tell you about King’s Mountain. Several people have told me they are looking forward to learning more about the Revolutionary War, just as they did last fall about the Civil War, but I don’t feel like I have a very good handle on that yet. The battle …

December 31, 2015

Five Favorite Places

You can see by the map on the top of my blog that Tom and I have been a lot of places in 2015. Today, the last day of the year, I wanted to highlight our five favorite places from the last year. Our top favorite place in 2015 was Scotty’s Castle and Death Valley …

December 3, 2015

Wonderful Rangers

As Tom and I continue as National Park Service Volunteers, we are always very impressed by the wonderful rangers we get to work with at the parks. There were some differences between rangers at Death Valley and rangers at Chickamauga and Chattanooga. But what stood out to us is the ways the rangers are similar …

November 25, 2015

Hunting for Monuments

One of the things we often do in the Visitors Center is look up where a particular monument is located. We have a map that shows all 1400 monuments and tablets located on the Chickamauga Battlefield. We also have a computer program that locates the tablets and monuments scattered on Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge, and …

November 20, 2015

Missionary Ridge

After two days of relatively light fighting, the Union army had pushed to the top of Orchard Knob and Lookout Mountain. General Hooker with his army was on the east side of Lookout Mountain. General Sherman had crossed the Tennessee River and had his army stationed north of Missionary Ridge. General Thomas and his army …