Last July, Jenny McBurney, a government publications librarian at the University of Minnesota, and her colleagues launched Save Our Signs, a crowdsourced initiative to document every sign in the more than 400 national parks and historic sites across the United States before the Trump administration removes them.

The project emerged in response to a sweeping campaign by the Trump administration to censor American history and science within the National Park Service (NPS). Under new directives, NPS rangers were instructed to flag and remove signs about slavery, Indigenous history, and the climate crisis if they were deemed to “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living” or to advance a “corrosive ideology.”

McBurney, who had been involved with the Data Rescue Project archiving censored government datasets, recognized that national park signs also represent publicly funded information at risk of erasure. “One goal, of course, is to take pictures of the signs before they’re removed so we have a record of them,” McBurney said. “But a second goal is that we want to engage the public and make sure that people know that this is happening and ask them: What do you think about this? Is this OK with you? What do you think our American history story should be?”

Isabelle Boelter, a library assistant at the University of Minnesota, described Save Our Signs as an opportunity to confront and protect history targeted for removal. “In a lot of helpless moments, we look for control and look for something to put our hands into,” Boelter said. “Save Our Signs is that opportunity and chance: it allows us to face the history that the administration is trying to remove and disappear, and instead, we’re able to help protect it.”

Volunteers have documented “before” photos of signs at numerous national parks where signs have been confirmed removed or altered, including Acadia National Park, Cape Cod National Seashore, Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie National Historic Park, Gateway National Park, Independence National Park, Muir Woods National Monument, the National Mall, and Virgin Islands National Park.

The project has even influenced travel plans, with a family rerouting a summer road trip from Minneapolis to Montana to visit sites along the Niobrara National Scenic River in Nebraska and the Missouri National Recreational River, a 100-mile stretch of the Missouri River spanning Nebraska and South Dakota.

Save Our Signs continues to mobilize volunteers nationwide to preserve these public historical records amid ongoing federal censorship efforts.

Sources