Fort Larned National Historic Site

The Parade Ground

Fort Larned was built just before the Civil War to protect travelers on the Santa Fe Trail. The fort consists of several buildings (barracks, officer's quarters, supply rooms mostly) arranged around a central parade ground. The fort has no walls, because the Native Americans did not attack en masse, preferring hit and run tactics on vulnerable groups. The number of soldiers at the fort was protection enough. It helps that the fort is protected on three sides by a river, and the fourth has a storage room that is designed to be a strong defensive position with rifle holes to shoot out of. The fort was decommissioned around 1880, and the fort was turned into a ranch.


Graffiti from the 1870's. The walls of the fort contained a lot of graffiti, mostly from the ranch years, but this one, the earliest I saw, was from when it was still a fort.

Full Name: Fort Larned National Historic Site
Location: South Central Kansas, near Larned, KS
Designated: August 1964
When I Visited: June 16, 2008

Brown v. Board of Education

The hallway inside the old school building, exhibits are in the classrooms.

Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site is located in the former Monroe Elementary School. The park consists mainly of a series of educational exhibits in several different classrooms. The largest room shows a series of videos about several different aspects of segregation. Other exhibits included a fairly typical museum layout about school desegregation, and a room where kids could express their feelings about the Civil Rights movement in a variety of kid friendly artistic media. One thing I felt was missing was a detailed look at the mechanics of the court case.

According to the park's website, they are in talks with other communities that had similar court cases that were bundled into Brown v. Board about commemorating the case in other locations. The other cities are Claymont, Delaware; Washington, DC; Farmville, Virginia; and Clarendon County, South Carolina.



The front door of the old Monroe Elementary School.

Just the Facts:
Full Name: Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site
Location: Topeka, Kansas
Designated: October 26, 1992
When I Visited: June 16, 2008; day three of my road trip