Blue Ridge Parkway receives National Historic Landmark designation

The Blue Ridge Parkway has been designated as a National Historic Landmark, one of 19 new sites named this week.

The announcement was made by the Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland on Monday.

There are more than 2,600 National Historic Landmarks found in the U.S. today. An NHL designation is the highest federal recognition of a property’s historical, architectural or archeological significance.

“As America’s storyteller, it is our privilege at the Department of the Interior, through the National Park Service, to tell our nation’s history and honor the many historical chapters and heroic communities that brought us to where we all are today,” said Haaland. “These newly designated historic landmarks join a list of the nation’s premier historic and cultural places, all of which were nominated through voluntary and locally led stewardship.”

The new NHLs are nationally significant properties for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer Americans, African Americans, Asian American Pacific Islanders and women’s history in addition to moments important in development of American technology, landscape design and art.

Azurest South in Petersburg and the Loudoun County Courthouse in Virginia were also designated as National Historic Landmarks.

New National Historick Landmark designations

• Blue Ridge Parkway is a masterwork of landscape architecture and transportation engineering and one of the finest examples of the collaborative work of the National Park Service and Bureau of Public Roads. It also represents the movement to conserve natural and cultural resources in the eastern United States through the expansion of the National Park System in the 1920s and 1930s.
• Azurest South (Petersburg is an International Style house designed by Virginia State University faculty member Amaza Lee Meredith as a residence for herself and her life partner, Edna Meade Colson. This unique architectural expression illustrates the history of queer Black women in the Jim Crow South.
• Loudoun County Courthouse (Leesburg) is the location of the 1933-1934 Commonwealth of Virginia v. Crawford trial which marked a turning point in the history of both African American lawyers and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s civil rights jurisprudence. Crawford led directly to now celebrated civil rights attorney Charles Hamilton Houston’s appointment as the NAACP’s first special counsel in charge of implementing its emerging legal program to methodically dismantle segregation.
• The Furies Collective (Washington, DC) was the headquarters of an influential lesbian feminist separatist collective and publishers of the nationally circulated newspaper The Furies.
• Lucy Diggs Slowe and Mary Burrill House (Washington, DC) is associated with Lucy Diggs Slowe, an influential Dean of Women at Howard University, where she advocated for educational parity between men and women students and brought the educational theory of student personnel (now student affairs) into the network of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). This property also represents female partnership among middle-class women in the early 20th century and the history of interwar LGBTQ activism.
• F.W. Woolworth Company Building (Greensboro, N.C.) is the site of an influential student-led sit in from February 1-July 25, 1960, that galvanized youth participation in nonviolent protest for African American civil rights.
• Charleston Cigar Factory (Charleston, S.C.) is nationally significant for its association with a strike led by African American women cigar workers during the winter of 1945-1946 that is highly illustrative of the post-World War II national strike wave and the links between labor and Civil Rights activism.
• Summit Camp (Placer and Nevada Cos., Calif.) is the archeological remains of the largest and longest occupied Chinese railroad construction camp on the transcontinental railroad (1865-1869). It is also an influential “type site” in the emergence of Chinese diaspora studies in the field of historical archaeology in the mid-20th century.
• Tor House (Robinson Jeffers Home) (Carmel, Calif.) is the residence of major 20th century American poet Robinson Jeffers. Many stone structures in the Tor House complex were personally constructed by Jeffers and all of his major works in a long and prolific career were written here.
• Boulder County Courthouse (Boulder, Colo.) is the site where Boulder County Clerk Clela Rorex issued six marriage licenses in 1975 to same-sex couples, playing a unique and pivotal role in bringing national attention to the issue of same-sex marriage.
• Latte Quarry at As Nieves (Rota, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands) is an outstanding example of a Latte Period stone quarry, with characteristic structural stone shafts and capstones still present. The site has the potential to contribute to a better understanding of the cultural history of its period (AD 1000 – late AD 1600s).
• Reeve REA Power Generating Plant (Hampton, Iowa) is remarkably intact diesel generated power plant built in 1938. It conveys the pivotal role of the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) in electrifying rural homes as part of the suite of New Deal programs intended to address rural poverty and modernize American farms.
• Manenggon Concentration Camp (Yona, Guam) is associated with the Japanese military occupation of Guam during World War II. The Japanese military incarcerated about half of the island’s 21,000 Indigenous CHamoru inhabitants in the weeks before the July 1944 American recapture of the island.
• Big Bone Lick Site (Union, Ky.) is considered the birthplace of vertebrate paleontology in North America and a world-class collection site for large Pleistocene epoch mammal fossils.
• Mr. Charlie Offshore Oil Rig (Morgan City, La.) is a pioneering and remarkably intact example of a Mobile Offshore Drilling Unit (MODU) first deployed in 1952. It illustrates technological advances in the affordable production and availability of oil, a defining characteristic of the American economy and society in the 20th century.
• Kregel Windmill Company Factory (Nebraska City, Neb.) is the only known surviving and intact windmill factory in the country, with an exceptional ability to convey the history and impact of once widespread and small-scale windmill manufacturing in the United States during the early 20th century.
• Lucknow (Moultonborough, N.H.) is an outstanding example of a large-scale rural estate designed according to the precepts of the American Arts and Crafts Movement. Built between 1913-1919 as a retirement retreat by shoe manufacturer Thomas Gustave Plant, Lucknow is an exceptionally intact ensemble that includes the house, gate houses, and extensive road and bridle trail system linking seven mountain peaks.
• Peter Hurd and Henriette Wyeth House and Studios (San Patricio, N.M.) is associated with two preeminent American painters, Regionalist Peter Hurd and Realist Henriette Wyeth, from 1934-1974. The ranch encompasses both the site and subjects of the mature work of Hurd and Wyeth and is where both resided and created art.
• Winged Foot Golf Club (Mamaroneck, N.Y.) exemplifies the “golden age” of golf course design and the work of master golf architect Albert Warren Tillinghast. The carefully preserved original complex includes two eighteen-hole golf courses and a clubhouse designed by Clifford Charles Wendehack and built in the 1920s.

For more information on National Historic Landmarks, visit the National Park Services website.