Independence Hall and Fort Sumter Are Only the Beginning
NPS signs and interpretive panels are now being removed from parks.
This week, we have learned about removals of National Park Service interpretive panels at the President's House and Fort Sumter. At Fort Sumter, two panels with content about how climate change is affecting the historic site were removed, as reported by the New York Times. At the President’s House site, part of Independence Hall National Historic Park, seven panels were removed that discussed the history of slavery in early America and the people who George Washington had enslaved at the site when he was president. The Philadelphia Inquirer has a detailed breakdown of the removed panels here. We anticipate more removals of NPS panels. We will also accept "after" photos to document the removals. Please send those to the same submission form.
Save Our Signs and the Data Rescue Project have been in contact with the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition (ATAC), a community group that was the driving force behind establishing the exhibit a decade ago. It is a tragedy to lose the huge amount of work the community and NPS employees put into this exhibit.
The Save Our Signs project was created in May in anticipation of this possibility, in response to the Trump administration’s “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order. Save Our Signs is a crowdsourced archive for photos of National Park Service interpretive panels. We have been cheered by the response from around the country, which allowed us to release a first set of about 10,000 photos from over 300 sites in the fall. We are still accepting photo submissions and plan to release a second set in the coming months. The archive is released under a CC0 (copyright-free) license, so the photos are free to reuse.
The Save Our Signs archive has preserved photos of the removed signs. We know these are not a replacement for the exhibits, but we hope they help us remember what has been lost.
