I Took to the Road and Found Hope for America

If you grow up near Philadelphia, sooner or later you end up at Independence Hall. I found myself there half a dozen times over the course of my childhood. I was raised in the 1970s, when the city was busy getting ready for—and then recovering from—the bicentennial. My parents dressed me up as a peanut (they were Jimmy Carter fans) and forced me to march in a 1976 parade. The costume was itchy and uncomfortable. It is my first historical memory.

Today, I can see that my childhood trips to places such as Independence Hall were more than get-out-of-school-free cards. We were performing a familiar American ritual, visiting the places where history happened so that we can figure out who we are in the present. Because 2026 is the U.S. semiquincentennial—the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—many Americans will be heading for sites that document the country’s founding era. But American history is a lot more than that, and the semiquincentennial should be too. After all, most of today’s country wasn’t part of the United States 250 years ago—not even close.

In 2023, looking ahead to the semiquin, I started visiting museums, historic sites, roadside attractions, monuments, living-history pageants, battlefields, and souvenir shops from all 250 years of our history. Along the way, I slept in a nuclear-missile silo and a 19th-century sex commune, attended Confederate Memorial Day, and, yes, went to Disneyland.

View: Roadside America, Photographs by John Margolies

My travels were a form of patriotism, though not of the sort currently on brand in Washington. American history is about “the excitement of becoming—always becoming, trying, probing, falling, resting, and trying again,” I learned at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, where Lyndon B. Johnson’s quote was inscribed on the wall. Nowhere is that trial and error more evident than at our country’s historic sites, many of which are engaged with making collective narratives out of an imperfect past. Despite recent pressures to downplay the darker parts of American history, public sites do not have the luxury of talking to only one audience, or of showing people only what they want them to see. Their doors are open to any traveler with the time, courage, and curiosity to walk in and start asking questions.

I walked into plenty of big-ticket places, including my childhood stomping ground of Independence Hall. (It’s holding up pretty well.) But I learned the most at smaller, lesser-known sites like Medora, North Dakota, and Mound Bayou, Mississippi, where communities are busy figuring out how to tell—and sell—their own American stories. Such local sites focus on a small group of people who happened to live in a certain place at a certain time—and who, for that fleeting moment, came to stand in for the dilemmas of the nation at large. I began to think of them all as guests at America’s 250th birthday party.

Compared with philadelphia, upstate New York does not make much of its past. The area’s most important historic sites tend to be modest, open a few days a week in midsize cities that don’t rank especially high on most Americans’ lists of places to visit. That’s a shame, because the region stretching from Albany in the east to Buffalo in the west—the Erie Canal corridor—contains some of the most startling and consequential history anywhere in the country. During the 1840s and 1850s, many of the great American social movements, including abolitionism, feminism, and reform-minded Christianity, took root and blossomed in this unlikely soil. Some of the most extraordinary figures in American history lived here too: Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, John Brown. The region produced two presidents before the Civil War: at one end, Martin Van Buren, born and raised near Albany; at the other, Millard Fillmore, who came from a struggling upstate farm family but eventually moved to big-city Buffalo. In a high point of my engagement with American history, I have now played Millard Fillmore’s piano.

Seneca Falls, at first glance, still looks like any other faded mill town. But today’s Seneca Falls is something unique in the American landscape: a town that has staked its future on the history of women. Signs along Main Street advertise shops like WomanMade Products and hawk souvenirs. Down by Van Cleef lake, Suffrage Park includes a shelter with benches and a splash of green lawn. Across the canal, an old sock factory has been turned into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, bigger and better-funded than the Abolitionist Hall of Fame, if still nothing to rival the illustrious National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, about a two-hour drive east.

At the center of Seneca Falls is its pièce de résistance: the only park in the entire National Park Service entirely devoted to women’s rights and women’s history. You might miss it if you’re not careful. I did, and I was looking for it, hoping to squeeze in a late-afternoon visit. Unlike the expansive battlefields and grand monuments that make up much of the park service, the Women’s Rights National Historical Park blends into the rest of the town, two unassuming brick buildings accompanied by an outdoor memorial and a small parking lot.

Once inside, though, I was startled by how relieved I felt. Traveling alone as a middle-aged woman is an uneven experience: day after day of irrelevance and anonymity punctuated by the occasional moment of threat or contempt. Most people at historic sites seem to be traveling in family packs, or at least in units of two; a solo woman can apparently be confusing to guides and fellow tourists—not a business traveler, exactly, but not a mom or wife or girlfriend either. At Seneca Falls, though, independent women don’t need to explain themselves. They are the best part of the town’s past and its best hope for the future.

In July 1848, some 300 men and women gathered at a local chapel to talk about women’s rights. The country had just celebrated July 4, so the example of the Declaration was on everyone’s mind. In preparation for the meeting, Elizabeth Cady Stanton had helped compose a new “Declaration of Sentiments.” “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal,” she wrote, in one of the great two-word edits of all time. From there, she ticked off a list of “injuries and usurpations” suffered by women—hence the need for a women’s Declaration, signed on July 20, 1848, at the chapel, which the park service now calls “Independence Hall for Women.

From the July/August 2023 issue: My God, this is a magical country

Since purchasing the chapel in 1985, the federal government has gone to great lengths to preserve and restore it. The iteration I saw was all about stripped-down accuracy: bare brick, eight rows of wooden pews. One exception was a colorful painting installed along both sides of the sanctuary, high above the heads of visitors, to represent the men and women who once crowded into the balcony to observe the proceedings and express their views. Among those present was Frederick Douglass, who advertised the gathering in his North Star newspaper and then made the trip over from nearby Rochester, where he was living at the time. When other participants, both male and female, questioned whether Stanton’s voting-rights plank was asking for too much, too soon, Douglass lent his support and helped turn the tide. “Our doctrine is, that ‘Right is of no sex,’” he wrote in The North Star. “We therefore bid the women engaged in this movement our humble God-speed.

Speed was not the order of the day, however. Sixty-eight women and 32 men signed the Declaration of Sentiments, including Douglass, the document’s only Black signatory. Unlike the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the act occasioned no immediate revolution. For all the thunderclap significance of 1848, Seneca Falls is a monument to women’s patience and frustration, and to the friendships that were needed to sustain their movement through the decades ahead.

Medora, north dakota, is all about men, not women—but people there, too, are wrestling with the American past. Specifically, they are wrestling with the outsize figure of Theodore Roosevelt, for whom wrestling was, indeed, a frequent preoccupation. A park ranger dressed as young TR—wire-framed glasses, red bandanna, button-down vest—told me that the future president built a cabin in what is now Medora after his first visit to the Badlands in 1883. Roosevelt returned the following year after the great dual tragedy of his life: the deaths of both his mother (from typhoid) and his young wife (from complications of childbirth) within 24 hours. By the standards of presidential estates, his cabin is not much to look at: a ponderosa-pine log structure with three rooms, plus a sleeping loft and root cellar. But Roosevelt later declared his time there a glorious period of strenuous living and personal rebirth. “I never would have been President if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota,” he said. That quote is now all over Medora.

The town’s operating premise is that what happened to Roosevelt in the Badlands eventually rippled out over the rest of the nation. Its downtown runs about four blocks in each direction, with streets lined by meticulous re-creations and restorations of buildings past. Almost all of it is dedicated to Roosevelt. Over the course of a single day, visitors can eat brunch with a TR impersonator, shop for a teddy bear (first inspired by TR), hike in the TR national park, and view a cardboard model of the upcoming TR presidential library, scheduled to open this July 4. For dinner, options include fine cuisine at Theodore’s Dining Room and the outdoor spectacle of Pitchfork Steak Fondue, in which brave chefs dunk your steak (yes, at the end of a pitchfork) into a vat of hot oil while you watch. As far as I can tell, Roosevelt never actually ate his food off a pitchfork, but the spirit of the meal—masculine, outdoorsy, self-promotional—seems about right.

According to a local museum, the all-TR-all-the-time strategy has made Medora “the most popular tourist attraction in North Dakota.” Out in the rest of the world, his legacy is more complicated. Roosevelt still stands for the high ambitions of progressivism: do-gooder government, federal intervention in the economy, concern for labor, wilderness conservation. But he was also an unabashed imperialist and a believer in racial hierarchy. In 2020, New York City decided to remove an equestrian statue of Roosevelt, flanked by an American Indian man and an African man, that had for decades stood outside the American Museum of Natural History. Roosevelt had helped support the museum in its early years and even donated some of his own collections. The decision to remove the statue, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio explained, had less to do with the details of Roosevelt’s patronage than with the fact that the statue “explicitly depicts Black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior.

If New York City no longer loves TR, Medora has remained loyal. As a tourist attraction, Medora traces its roots to the 1950s, when a North Dakota businessman named Harold Schafer set out to save what was left of the declining town. Walking through Medora today is more like walking through Schafer’s 1950s than through TR’s 1880s; everything is clean, neat, and well packaged. That includes the Medora Musical, a nightly patriotic revue that is the high point of the visitor experience. The musical takes place in a spectacular outdoor amphitheater that has stadium seating on one side of the stage and the jagged red-and-purple-striped formations of the Badlands rolling out for miles on the other.

On the night I was there, the musical’s final sequences raced through “This Land Is Your Land,” “God Bless America,” “America the Beautiful,” and other patriotic anthems as red-white-and-blue-clad dancers jumped and spun onstage. Most of the cast did not come from North Dakota; they were from theater, dance, and music places like New York and Chicago. But they seemed game to reinforce the evening’s message that the people of North Dakota were especially virtuous and hardworking—and, above all, especially American.

In my travels, I found plenty of interesting history at officially designated sites such as Seneca Falls and Medora. But some of the most fascinating stuff was in out-of-the-way places. One morning, for instance, while perusing the local newspaper over breakfast in Cleveland, Mississippi, I realized that I was just nine miles away from Mound Bayou. Mound Bayou! I almost choked on my muffin. Mound Bayou’s story is as strange and glorious and American as it gets.

The story begins with Jefferson Davis’s brother, Joseph, who, unlike his younger sibling, entertained some progressive ideas about how American society ought to be run. Joseph owned a cotton plantation in Mississippi, and after the Civil War ended, he sold it on installment to Benjamin Montgomery, the well-educated but enslaved man whom he had long entrusted with managing it. For about a decade, the Montgomery family operated the plantation as its own. Jefferson Davis never liked his brother’s scheme, though, and when he got out of prison he set out to reclaim the family lands. In the early 1880s, having lost the plantation, Montgomery’s son I.T. sought to establish himself somewhere that a Black man could live with a reasonable amount of freedom. He settled on a site in the Delta, where two bayous intersected near a Native American mound.

Mound Bayou soon evolved into a self-governing Black community—“an island of black self-rule in a sea of white supremacy,” in the words of the scholars David T. and Linda Royster Beito. I. T. Montgomery established a prosperous cotton-growing-and-processing enterprise. The town also experimented with an industrial bread-making facility and a bottling plant. Mound Bayou had its own schools and its own town government, though its citizens could rarely exercise their right to vote in state or federal elections. In 1911, Booker T. Washington pronounced it an “inspiration.” Theodore Roosevelt called it the “jewel of the Delta.

It was one of T.R.’s namesakes, a man named Theodore Roosevelt Mason (T. R. M.) Howard, who ushered Mound Bayou into the civil-rights age. Born in Kentucky, Howard attended college in Nebraska, then went to medical school in California and launched a successful career as a surgeon. But when Mound Bayou reached out in 1941, offering him a job as the chief surgeon at a soon-to-be-opened, entirely Black-run hospital, he couldn’t say no. Howard moved to Mound Bayou in 1942, in the middle of World War II, and transformed the town with his T.R.-level energies. Despite his full-time work as a doctor, he ran a 1,000-acre farm; a mutual life-insurance company; and a credit union. He also opened a restaurant and beer garden and built a public park, a zoo, and a swimming pool.

Howard turned Mound Bayou into a sanctuary city for early voting-rights efforts. Many of the most famous names in Mississippi civil-rights history got their start in Mound Bayou, or found support and safety there. Medgar Evers worked for Howard’s insurance company before departing to run the state NAACP. Movement leaders such as Amzie Moore and Aaron Henry collaborated with Howard through the Regional Council of Negro Leadership. Howard’s mass rallies in Mound Bayou attracted marquee names such as the singer Mahalia Jackson and William Dawson, a congressman from Chicago. When Emmett Till was murdered nearby in 1955, Howard helped lead the hunt for witnesses and offered Till’s mother, Mamie, a place to stay during the trial, with armed protection.

After breakfast, I headed off in search of Mound Bayou. I drove along the Dr. T. R. M. Howard Memorial Highway, past a purple-and-white welcome sign proclaiming Mound Bayou the oldest u.s. all black municipality; founded by ex-slaves in 1887. Alas, though, Howard’s mid-century boomtown was nowhere to be seen. Many of the historic buildings are still there, including the old hospital right in the center of town, but they are largely empty or in a state of disrepair. Apple Maps got me as far as the hospital, a single-story brick building identifiable by the Art Deco letters over the main entrance, then left me to fend for myself in my search for the local museum.

From the September 2019 issue: The great land robbery

I parked my car and looked around for historic markers. Eventually, I talked with three men who were hanging out near the gas station. If they wondered why I was wandering around town staring at signs and scribbling down notes, they were nice enough not to ask. I disclosed my mission, at which point they confirmed that yes, a museum existed, but that no, it was not open. Perhaps noticing my crestfallen expression, one of them suggested that I go knock on the window of a gray car just across the street, because one of the museum’s founders, Darryl Johnson, happened to be sitting there. I walked over and waved at the man inside, who wrapped up his phone call, confirmed his identity, and said he’d call his brother, Hermon, who had the keys to the museum. (You gotta love a small town.) Hermon showed up about three minutes later.

The brothers dream of turning Mound Bayou into a historic town like Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, restored to its glory days. Their museum, which opened in 2021, is a first step. It’s located next to the hospital (Apple Maps was not totally wrong) in the fine-arts rooms of the former John F. Kennedy Memorial High School, which closed in 2018 for lack of funding and students. The museum still looks like a public-school classroom: yellow cinder-block walls, fluorescent lights, drop ceiling. But now, instead of desks or band risers, it is brimming with historic objects, including a giant reproduction of an old real-estate ad promoting Mound Bayou’s “good schools,” Carnegie library, and local bank. Hermon explained that they prefer the term exposeum rather than museum to explain what they’re doing, because their goal is to expose the lies and tell the truths of the American past.

Since finishing my journeys, I’ve often returned to a question that Benjamin Franklin posed just after the Constitutional Convention of 1787: Is the sun rising or setting on the United States of America? One thing you learn from studying history is just how hard it can be to know the answer, one way or the other, at any given moment. Plenty of developments are alarming right now, even as America is supposedly becoming great again. But that’s almost always been the case. In every era, someone was sure that the moment of decline and collapse had finally arrived. That’s part of what inspired the preservation of so many historic sites: the anxiety that the country’s past might actually have been better than its future.

For anyone nervous about the country, hitting the road and learning about its history this semiquincentennial year might provide some existential comfort, because they will see that Americans have managed to get themselves out of big messes before. At the very least, it makes it harder to say that things today are worse than ever. Among its other fine qualities, the past offers tools for thinking about how to create change in situations where the odds look daunting. One of those tools is the American narrative itself—its symbols and heroes, its lessons and points of caution.

Overall, I came away from my travels heartened about the state of our country—or at least more heartened than I had been doomscrolling through the news at home. Whatever else we may be, Americans are still engaged with discovering, documenting, reinventing, and showing off our history. Public-opinion polls suggest that faith in American progress is more or less dead, but I found plenty of it at historic sites—struggling maybe, but still kicking. Even at the places where we go to confront the most wrenching, unjust, and difficult parts of the American past, there’s a quiet hope that next time we’ll do it better.

This essay was adapted from Beverly Gage’s new book, This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History.

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