Brooks: Minnesota archivists scramble to document national park signs before they’re gone

If you travel to one of our great national parks, monuments or historic sites this summer, look for the signs.

There’s a reason they call the national park system America’s biggest classroom. There are signs that explain the geology of the Grand Canyon and signs that teach paleontology at Dinosaur National Monument. There are signs at Independence National Historical Park that share the first lines of the Declaration: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal … There are signs at the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home that tell the story of a civil rights icon gunned down in his own driveway.

Take a picture of those signs if you can. They might not be there the next time you visit.

Which is where the historians, the librarians and the University of Minnesota come in. They’re out to Save Our Signs, with a little help from vacationing Minnesotans.

New signs appeared in the parks this summer, posted on orders from the Trump administration, asking visitors to report “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans.” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ordered the removal of offending signs by Sept. 17.

There’s no central database for park signs. Data archivists need to know what we have before they can figure out what we might lose.

“We have no way to know what signs have been removed, or what will be removed in the future. We don’t even know what it means to ‘inappropriately disparage America,’” said Kirsten Delegard, director of the university’s Mapping Prejudice Project and a historian who knows how easily Americans forget the uglier chapters of our story. A sign in a park “could just disappear and it would be gone forever.”

Librarians, historians and public data experts at the U co-founded the Save Our Signs project — a crowdsourcing site where park visitors can upload photos of historical and information signs they see in the parks this summer. See something, save something.

The U was a natural fit for a data rescue project. Its library is a regional depository for government documents — a vast storehouse of government information and publications. The Congressional Record, the Federal Register, every new law added to the U.S. Code, every word spoken during Sen. Strom Thurmond’s 24-hour-18-minute attempt to filibuster the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Books, pamphlets, microfiche, maps, videos, tiny scraps of paper. Government publications librarian Jenny McBurney safeguards them all, for anyone who wants to see them.

“Gov docs come in all sorts of formats,” she said. “There’s boxes of recipes for mass meals to feed an army, or feed an entire school of children, from the ‘50s. There’s children’s books about bats and puzzles about NASA. Everything you can possibly think of, gov docs covers.”

But nobody kept a record of signs in the parks, she said, “because they’re supposed to be in the park, where they belong.”

When information began disappearing from government websites this year, data archivists rushed to the rescue. The Data Rescue Project has preserved more than 1,000 datasets from 86 government offices.

As Burgum set his 120-day deadline to delete unflattering history from historical sites, McBurney and Delegard joined a digital bucket brigade.

There are 433 sites in the national park system and about two-thirds of them are dedicated to preserving and sharing history. There are battlefields, seashores, memorials, factories, monuments, ancient pipestone quarries, the theater where Abraham Lincoln was shot and the stretch of the Tallahatchie River where they found what remained of 14-year-old Emmett Till.

American history is fascinating. Not all of it is pretty.

“History is central to the Park Service mission,” said Anne Whisnant, a Duke University professor and lead author of “Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service.”

Over the past 50 years, the Park Service had worked to tell a more nuanced version of the American story. One where George Washington could be both a founding father and someone who bequeathed 317 enslaved men, women and children to his wife in his will, with instructions that half of them should be freed upon her death.

Telling half the story — a rosy, gauzy version of an America that never was — robs people of the lessons they need to deal with hardships and setbacks today, Whisnant said.

“It would leave us without the tools to make our world better,” she said. “If we’re just led to believe that everything was fine, all throughout the past, well, we’re overlooking the fact that it wasn’t fine for a lot of people.”

If America is great, it’s not because we never made mistakes. It’s because we learned from those mistakes.

Six sites in Minnesota are part of the national park system: Voyageurs National Park; Grand Portage National Monument; the St. Croix National Scenic River; the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area; the North Country National Scenic Trail; and Pipestone National Monument.

If you visit one of them this summer, or any of the 400 or so other sites, you can upload photos of the signs you see to saveoursigns.org. Save Our Signs plans to start sharing these images later in the fall.