Welcome to the Park of the Week Newsletter for January 4, 2024. This week’s park celebrates the site where one of the most famous and influential African Americans in U.S. history was freed from slavery.
Booker T. Washington National Monument
Location
Franklin County, Virginia, United States
Claim to fame
Booker Taliaferro Washington was born into slavery in April of 1856. He spent the first several years of his childhood on a plantation owned by a family of tobacco farmers and slave-traders. Washington was listed in their accounting as a boy valued at $400. Today the plantation where he was enslaved bears his name, as Booker T. Washington National Monument.
At the end of the U.S. Civil War, when Washington was still a boy, he and his family were freed. He recalled the moment in his later writings, saying that a man came to their plantation and read aloud a text which Washington believed was the Emancipation Proclamation. His mother wept with joy and explained to Washington that they were now free.
Washington would grow up to be one of the most famous and influential African Americans of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He founded and oversaw the Tuskegee Institute and was the first African American publicly invited to the White House to dine with a U.S. president.
Reason to visit
Booker T. Washington National Monument is a small park with a large and impactful story to tell. Washington wrote that his time as a slave was similar to that of other slaves; this park is a memorial to not just Washington but to all those who suffered under hundreds of years of enslavement. It’s places like these that remind us of who we are and who we no longer want to be.
The park is still a working farm, with livestock and acres of forest and fields. There are a few hiking trails which navigate visitors through the places that Washington must have been familiar with as a child. The small cabin/kitchen where Washington lived has been reconstructed, and a short walk around the grounds leads through this and other pre-Civil War era buildings. The monument also has a small visitor center with a museum, film, and store.
Each year Booker T. Washington National Monument celebrates Juneteenth on the same land where Washington and his fellow slaves were emancipated.
Wild Fact
To raise money to purchase the land for Booker T. Washington National Monument, a coin was created and sold. The Booker T. Washington Memorial half dollar was minted and sold between 1946 and 1951. It was the first U.S. coin to feature an African American.
On one side of the coin was an image of the slave cabin where Washington was born, on the other was his likeness. The text imprinted on the coin read “From Slave Cabin to Hall of Fame,” in honor of Washington being the first African American honored as a part of New York University’s Hall of Fame of Great Americans.
Though over 1.5 million of the coins were minted and many sold, the lagging interest in commemorative coins at the time meant that not enough coins were sold to make a profit. The Commonwealth of Virginia stepped in and purchased the land on which Booker T. Washington Monument now sits.
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