Local Park Service Sites Flagged for Review Under Trump Executive Order
Park Service sites were asked to identify public-facing material that could be in violation of Executive Order 14253, "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History."
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
Email Adele
Publications, signs, and wayside markers at three greater Fredericksburg-area National Park Service sites—Chatham in Stafford, the George Washington Birthplace National Monument in Westmoreland, and Prince William Forest Park in Prince William—are among hundreds submitted for review as possibly conflicting with the Trump administration’s executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
In response to the order, the Secretary of the Interior in June of 2025 directed NPS sites to identify any “images, descriptions, depictions, messages, narratives or other information (content) that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in Colonial times)” or that “emphasize matters unrelated to the beauty, abundance, or grandeur” of the site’s natural features.
Park service staff were to have identified any public-facing content that could violate this order via an online reporting tool by July 18, 2025.
Last month, the Washington Post was the first to report on a database of leaked documents that included NPS site responses to the reporting tool.
Chatham
According to the documents, NPS staff at the Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park—which oversees the Chatham site—flagged a wayside panel at the site as potentially violating the order.
The panel states in its entirety:
Chatham has watched quietly over Fredericksburg for almost 250 years … It has witnessed great events and played host to important people. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln were here; Clara Barton and Walt Whitman too. To some residents it was a home, to others a place of toil, and to soldiers during the war a headquarters or a hospital.
Here at Chatham, as at few other places, is the full breadth of Southern history: its rise on the foundation of slavery, its ruin during the turbulent years of the Civil War, and its rebirth in the 1900s. Chatham is not merely the story of a Southern house, but of American culture—sometimes cruel and unjust, sometimes noble and refined, but always interesting.
Staff of the park wrote in the reporting tool that the last sentence of the panel “makes a pretty sweeping statement about ‘American culture’ … This may violate SO 3431 [the Secretary’s order] and is honestly just not a great reflection on the site itself.”
Staff noted that there is “updated language for our approach to enslavement that would be good to implement.”
“The sign itself is also very busy in design and faded. We could rework it with the original file to streamline and revise text, or I could see restarting from scratch,” staff reported.
The panel is still up at Chatham.
George Washington Birthplace National Monument
The George Washington Birthplace submitted five publications for review, noting that the “Park is seeking guidance on whether these exhibits/films/interpretive products meet the criteria of SO 3431.”
In a NPS spreadsheet that was included with the leaked documents, these five publications are flagged with the designation “Needs Review: Contains content that may conflict with SO 3431 or EO 14253 [the Trump executive order].”
The publications include a rack card titled “How the Washington Story Began Here” which states that George Washington’s great-grandparents, Anne and John Washington, built a home on the site in 1664 “where they lived with their two children, English servants, and enslaved African people that Washington imported from Caribbean traders.”
Staff also submitted for review information the park service has published about the Wakefield National Memorial Association, which was founded in 1923 to restore the birthplace.
This information, which appears on buildings created by the Association, states that their work “was heavily influenced by the Colonial Revival Movement” which was “a response to rapid societal changes such as increased industrialization, immigration, the aftermath of war, and wealth in the hands of those who had not inherited it.”
“In a time of change and uncertainty, the Movement sought stability by evoking virtues of the Colonial era and promoting an idealized past.”
Birthplace site staff also submitted two wayside panels for review. These have also been flagged “Needs Review: Contains content that may conflict with SO 3431 or EO 14253.”
One, about “The Tidewater Gentry,” states that “Cultivating and selling tobacco, through the use of enslaved labor, was part of the gentry way of life” and that “… the values of the Tidewater gentry would been a powerful influence on [George Washington’s] life.”
The other wayside panel submitted for review is titled “Enslaved on this Land.” It lists “the names of enslaved people who lived here alongside the Washington family into the 1800s.”
Prince William Forest Park
Staff at this site submitted four instances where language on signs, exhibits, and wayside panels could conflict with the orders.
The first is an exhibit panel about the Cabin Branch Pyrite Mine, which states that the mine “closed in 1920, leaving a scarred landscape, still recovering, and an economic wound that never healed.”
The second instance is a wayside panel about the Piedmont Forest Trail, which states “Agricultural practices and development have destroyed most of [the] eastern woodlands” that at one time covered the coast from Alabama to New York.
The third instance identified by park staff is a wayside panel on the Mary Bird Branch Trail, which describes how the local beaver population dwindled by the mid-1800s due to the popularity of beaver hats and coats.
Staff wrote that this language, along with that in the Piedmont Forest wayside panel and the pyrite mine exhibit, “may be inconsistent with guidance.”
Finally, park staff submitted as potentially conflicting with guidance a wayside panel titled “Reclaiming the Land,” which reads, “Today, Virginia pine trees grow on the hillside where the Cabin Branch Pyrite Mine operated, and Quantico Creek no longer runs orange or smells of sulfur.”
Status of flagged content unclear
The leaked documents do not include information about what public-facing information has been chosen for revision or removal.
As reported by the Hill, a spokesperson for the Interior Department, which oversees the National Park Service, said in an email that “these draft, deliberative internal documents are not a representation of final action taken by the Department.”
The group Save Our Signs—which was launched following the Trump Administration’s executive order 14253 and seeks “build a community archive of the signs, exhibits, and texts that could soon disappear from our national parks”—has used the leaked documents to create an interactive map of all the NPS survey responses.
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