Last July, Jenny McBurney, a government publications librarian at the University of Minnesota, and several 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 instructions, NPS rangers were directed to flag and remove signs addressing topics such as slavery, Indigenous history, and the climate crisis if they were deemed to “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living” or promote a “corrosive ideology.”

McBurney, who had previously joined the Data Rescue Project to archive government datasets at risk of deletion, recognized that national park signs also represent publicly funded information that could be lost. “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 the project as a way to regain control amid uncertainty: “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 with Save Our Signs have documented “before” photos of signs at multiple national parks where removals or alterations have been confirmed, 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 effort 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.

The Save Our Signs project highlights a grassroots response to federal censorship efforts, aiming to preserve public access to historical and scientific information in national parks funded by taxpayers.

Sources