Heritage

North Atlantic National Heritage Areas

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There are ten heritage areas in New York and New England, and all of them protect places frequently described as beautiful, historic and quaint. Growing up in the region, I am biased, but I highly recommend visiting all of them.

  • Blackstone River Valley NHC, explore the mill towns that defined the Industrial Revolution
  • Champlain Valley NHP, hike in the canyons of the Adirondacks on this route to Canada
  • Downeast Maine NHA, catch the first rays of sunrise on the scenic coast of Maine, have tea in Campobello, and learn about the Acadians near St Croix IHS
  • Erie Canalway NHC, take five looking for a mule named Sal, and sing a few bars
  • Essex NHA, wander the old streets of Salem past Hawthorne’s house of the seven gables and go see the 17th century Saugus Ironworks
  • Freedom’s Way NHA, see where the Minute Men fired the shot heard round the world and the small towns where they lived and dreamt revolutionary ideas
  • Hudson River Valley NHA, FDR, Van Buren, Vanderbilt, Saratoga, St Paul’s, Thomas Cole…
  • Last Green Valley NHC, step back into an authentic 19th century village (below)
  • Niagara Falls NHA, besides the obvious, visit the Old Fort and learn some history
  • Upper Housatonic NHA, visit Edith Wharton’s historic Mount in the Berkshires

Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area

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The Housatonic River runs down the western edge of Massachusetts through Connecticut, and the heritage area is shared by both states. Connecticut gets the best natural areas—the bogs, fern filled cobbles (hills) and pine forests—and Massachusetts gets the best historic places. My childhood schooling is filled with stories from the Berkshires, so I wanted to revisit The Mount (above) in Lenox Massachusetts most of all. And how much improved it is! But that’s getting far ahead of the story.

The Mohicans lived here first, and before the Revolution, English settlers swapped land with them. Some of the first to learn to speak the native language were missionaries, and Rev John Sergeant’s house in Stockbridge can be visited during the summer. After Independence, the Shakers settled in Pittsfield, and their living history museum is recommended too. The old mill of the company that makes the paper for US currency is in Dalton. Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne lived and wrote here around 1850, and Melville’s Pittsfield home can be visited too. W.E.B. Du Bois was born and raised in Great Barrington, and there’s a walking tour in addition to his homesite, not far from Simon’s Rock, which has an excellent program dedicated to Du Bois.

Edith Wharton built the Mount in 1902 and wrote many of her most famous books there. Her maiden name was Jones—as in the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses”—and her husband was related to the business school. She had already rebuilt Lands End on the Cliff Walk in Newport RI, making Interior Design a profession when she co-wrote a book about it. Gilded Age women were not supposed to be progressive writers, but Edith Wharton was, becoming the first woman to win a Pulitzer for Fiction in 1921 with The Age of Innocence.

When I visited the Mount as a child, the girls’ equestrian school there had just closed, and the once magnificent home was falling apart. I remember adults being much concerned with marble fireplaces collapsing, whether a Shakespeare company might help save it, or whether it would be demolished for condos. I liked the formal garden but little remained of the famous author who lived there. But thanks to some devoted preservationists, including a collection saved by a book dealer in London, the home and library have been gloriously restored. Highly recommended.

The Last Green Valley National Heritage Corridor

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Old Sturbridge Village above in Massachusetts is emblematic of the Valley, which is delightfully wooded, rural and historic with mill villages, museums and natural preserves. In my youth I ran cross country through the area at small traditional New England schools, and I took many field trips to the living history museum pictured. There are old farmhouses, taverns, gardens, barns, gristmills, cider mills, meetinghouses, galleries, shops, pottery, bakeries, crafts and more, all through the valley, dozens of historic sites too. Patriots Clara Barton and Nathan Hale—‘I regret I have but one life to give to my country’—came from this valley. One uncommon benefit of preserving traditions here are the dark skies at night, perfect for star gazing. Much has been lost of the old ways in our sprawling busy modern developments, but not here.

Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor

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Just up the hill here past the Port Byron dry-dock/ lock is an old tavern. Maybe that’s why so many locals contracted to build the original canal: everyone knew life would be better with a canal. Once there was a passenger & freight shipping route between New York City and the Great Lakes, cities grew all along the canal. Turns out there have been several versions of the canal, from the original crowd-sourced 4’ deep, the bigger one (above) and the current large barge canal that a local brewery and many other folk still use now.

The canal connects the scenic and historic Hudson Valley to Lake Erie, below the Niagara Escarpment, or ‘from Albany to Buffalo’. I’ve driven the route many times in my electric car and visited the park sites in the heritage area, like Fort Stanwix, Saratoga, Women’s Rights and more, but I ignored the canal. Not because I don’t like it or discount its importance, but because I thought I might do the Great Loop someday and travel the length by boat. Anyway, I finally stopped along the way to chat with the seasonal staff and take a photo. It’s a wonderful 500 mile stretch of Americana. If you didn’t learn the song in Kindergarten, listen to Bruce Springsteen sing it on YouTube.

I’ve got a mule and her name is Sal
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal
She’s a good old worker and a good old pal
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal

We haul’d some barges in our day
Filled with lumber, coal, and hay
We know every inch of the way
From Albany to Buffalo

Low bridge, everybody down
Low bridge, yeah we’re coming to a town
And you’ll always know your neighbor
And you’ll always know your pal
If ya ever navigated on the Erie Canal

Heritage Areas in Pennsylvania

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Pennsylvania has eight National Heritage Areas, by far the most of any state, and I have visited them all by EV. Kudos to their politicians, but Pennsylvania does have many unique areas worth visiting.

The Delaware & Lehigh National Heritage Corridor includes the National Canal Museum with summer canal boat rides and different trails and bike paths along historic routes for coal and early American industry. The trail runs (with a few gaps) from the Lower Delaware River, through Allentown and will eventually connect with Wilkes Barre on the Susquehanna River.

The Journey Through Hallowed Ground NHA covers Civil War sites across four states, with Gettysburg being the star in Pennsylvania.

Lackawanna Valley NHA’s star is Steamtown above, but the area includes electric trolleys, as well as historic coal, iron and industrial sites.

The Oil Region NHA includes Drakes Well and other sites related to the birth of the modern petroleum industry in the Quaker State.

Fort Necessity and Friendship Hill are both in the Rivers of Steel NHA, but the historic focus is best seen by visiting sites like a blast furnace or a foundry & machine shop that explain how the steel industry began.

Schuylkill River Greenways NHA includes Hopewell Furnace, Independence NHP and Valley Forge NHP, but there are also over 100 miles of river to explore paddling, hiking or driving. (Say SKOO-kil meaning ‘hidden river’; so Schuylkill River is redundant.)

Susquehanna NHA focuses on the river valley and colonial York more-so than the Amish communities of Lancaster County, and there are many beautiful natural places to explore.

The Path of Progress National Heritage Tour Route is currently a bit DIY, but it includes Allegheny Portage, Fallingwater and Johnstown Flood sites along picturesque, winding historic roads.

Oil Region National Heritage Area

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[Apologies for posting this a day behind schedule.] Light sweet crude oil (above) means a thin, low-sulfur, unrefined oil, and at one time the global price was set here in western Pennsylvania, where it was found in 1859 at 70’ in a lucky strike by Edwin Drake. Of course, the Seneca had already discovered the oil where it seeped into Oil Creek, and they had long used it for various purposes, including as Vaseline, but Drake built a well to extract oil as fast as it could be pumped out. His backers already knew of many commercial uses, including replacing whale oil which was used for lamps. The industry helped the Union win the Civil War. Quaker State and Pennzoil were born near here, and John D. Rockefeller was an early customer. Ida Tarbell, daughter of a local independent forced out by the monopoly, went on to write a critical history of Standard Oil.

The hub of the heritage area, the Drake Well Museum has a variety of equipment over 100 years old and many exhibits explaining the different oil products produced by refining at different temperatures and occasional demonstrations of (recycled) oil pumped up by the reconstructed historic well below. If you want to learn the story, you can look up the 1954 Vincent Price movie about “Colonel” Drake on YouTube; it was made by the American Petroleum Institute. With Halloween almost upon us, nothing could be more appropriate than watching a movie about the oil industry starring an actor famous for horror movies.

No matter how cleanly carbon is burned, it is still dangerous, as running a car inside a garage proves. In only 165 years, we extracted and burned millions of years of accumulated oil, and we changed the composition of our atmosphere. Carbon levels have risen at an incredibly fast rate back to where they were about 3 million years ago, ten times as long ago as when human Homo sapiens (wise) evolved. Considering the mass extinctions our carbon burning will cause and our inexcusable refusal to stop, we should probably rename ourselves Homo stultus (foolish).

Niagara Falls National Heritage Area

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About 15 scenic miles north of Niagara Falls on the US side of the Niagara River is Old Fort Niagara overlooking Lake Ontario. The fort is run by a non-profit licensed by New York State, and it preserves the 17th century stone building, ramparts, drawbridge, cannon and the various accoutrements of French, British and American soldiers who served there from before the Revolution till after the War of 1812. The British took the French fort in a siege in 1759, and then they took it again from the Americans in 1813, bayoneting around 6 dozen. Otherwise the fort changed hands by treaties. The visitor center, fort and grounds make a pleasant, educational diversion from the falls if you’re in the area.

But if you’re interested in forts and war history, I recommend crossing the Niagara River border and visiting Old Fort Erie in Canada. That British fort predates the US and was the site of the bloodiest battle of the War of 1812. Hotly contested for control of the area during that war, the Americans took the fort in 1813, relinquished it, took it again in 1814 and held it against a ferocious siege where each side had over 1000 casualties. While not part of the US Niagara Falls NHA, it is a highlight of Niagara Parks right over the bridge in Canada.

Adirondack Biosphere & Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership

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Much of upstate New York belongs to the Adirondacks, with old mountains, lakes, forests, wildlife and scenery. Two of the more famous tourist spots are the High Falls Gorge (above) and the Ausable Chasm (below), both on the Ausable River—from the French ‘au sable’ meaning ‘sandy’—which is fed from Lake Placid and flows down to Lake Champlain. Since they’re well developed old trails, walking along the secure walkways and overlooks costs about $20 each, but I think they’re still worth it, though neither is quite the scale I imagined for the ‘Grand Canyon of the East’.

Lake Champlain is part of the water route from New York City to Quebec, so several key battles were fought in the area, including at Saratoga and during the War of 1812. The British were winning in 1814, having sacked DC, but Thomas Macdonough won the Battle of Lake Champlain aboard his ship, the USS Saratoga, thwarting a British invasion down the Hudson in 1814.

This National Heritage Area preserves both history and beautiful nature, including Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller in Vermont. The Champlain-Adirondack Biosphere is also recognized by UNESCO for its forests, wetlands and mountains in both upstate NY and about 1/2 of Vermont. Unfortunately, the Trump administration ended the only other UNESCO Biosphere in the North Atlantic Region at New Hampshire’s Hubbard Brook hardwood forest research. Still, there are many other fascinating places to visit in this diverse heritage area, such as the Antique Boat Museum in Clayton New York on the St Lawrence River, as well as the scenic homelands of the Algonquin and Iroquois people near the Canadian border.

Midwest Region National Heritage Areas

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The Midwest region has 8 NHA’s—more than most regions—ranging from industrial to pastoral, and most are devoted to travel by horse, boat, car or plane. Each heritage area provides a unique way for us to learn our history and explore our diverse culture in vibrant and interactive ways, such as riding in a Santa Fe Trail stagecoach above. Parks travelers tend to focus on the most famous iconic national parks, but I found some of my most treasured experiences below.

If you missed any of the posts above, I encourage you to click on them now, especially the last one. I’m slowly filling in the map and will continue posting Midwest state photo summaries on alternate Saturdays. I only have a few more Midwest national park units to post before I complete all sites in the region, and look for a few more New York sites. Thursdays will alternate between summaries like this one and eclectic extras like last week.

MotorCities National Heritage Area

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Behind “Elizabeth” above is the secret room where Henry Ford designed and built the first Model T in his factory on Piquette Avenue on the then outskirts of Detroit. His buddy Harvey Firestone got the first ride, and then Ford road-tested the vehicle by driving through Wisconsin to the Upper Peninsula on a hunting trip. (Along with the influential naturalist John Burroughs and the inventor Thomas Edison, the four were close friends and camping buddies). Then, introduced in 1908, the Ford Model T took over the US car market.

Roughly half the price of a horse-drawn carriage (including horses, shoes and fodder), priced lower than competing cars, and offering useful attachments like truck beds, skis or tractor wheels, folks loved the rugged, practical vehicles. Ford had already built models B, C, F, K, R, N and S in this factory, but a lighter weight steel allowed him to build the vehicle he knew would be popular in rural America (Ford grew up on a 200 acre farm), the Model T, with 6 models ranging from $825 to $1100: the Roadster, Tourabout, 5-Passenger Touring Car(above), Town Car, Coupe (popular with doctors) and Landaulet (taxi). The original Model A that had been built down the road in 1903 was redesigned and reintroduced in 1927 to replace the Model T as another commercial success. Of over 100 car makers in Michigan when Ford started, his is the only original firm remaining.

By making the popular standard car, Ford determined the direction of the industry. His wife insisted the steering wheel be placed on the roadside, so that when he drove she didn’t dirty her dress while stepping to the curb. Instead of alternatives like steam-punk coal-burning vehicles or electric vehicles—several of Ford’s earliest vehicles were electric—, gasoline was readily available across the country for small machines and farm equipment. Before realizing that black paint was cheaper and dried quicker, red and green models were also sold, often with raw white rubber tires, as above. After making various improvements to the assembly process here, Ford designed his next factory with steel-reinforced concrete floors to bring parts down to the world’s first synchronized assembly line. While this fascinating heritage area includes many different car museums, the Piquette Factory tour must be considered the highlight, with two dozen early model cars built here on display over 100 years later.