National Park Stamps

WhereMaine

Established1919

The first national park east of the Mississippi, assembled almost entirely from land donated by private citizens.

WhereMassachusetts

Established1946

Key personJohn Adams

The homes of two presidents — John and John Quincy Adams — and four generations of one remarkable family.

WhereMassachusetts

Established1980

Key personWilliam C. Nell

Preserves the Beacon Hill community and the African Meeting House at the center of Boston's Black abolitionism.

WhereMassachusetts

Established1996

A constellation of islands and peninsulas in Boston Harbor — a Civil War fort, lighthouses, and tide pools a ferry ride from downtown.

WhereMassachusetts

Established1974

Key personPaul Revere

Ties together the Freedom Trail — Faneuil Hall, Old North Church, Bunker Hill, and the USS Constitution.

WhereMassachusetts

Established1961

Key personJohn F. Kennedy

Forty miles of protected Atlantic shore, set aside with the help of native son President Kennedy.

WhereMassachusetts

Established1967

Key personJohn F. Kennedy

The Brookline house where JFK was born and spent his early childhood.

WhereMassachusetts

Established1972

Key personGeorge Washington

Washington's 1775–76 headquarters during the Siege of Boston, later the home of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

WhereMassachusetts

Established1978

Preserves the canals and brick mills of America's first large-scale planned industrial city, where the textile revolution took hold.

WhereMassachusetts

Established1959

Key personPaul Revere

The Lexington–Concord road where the Revolution's first shots — "the shot heard round the world" — rang out on April 19, 1775.

WhereMassachusetts

Established1938

Key personNathaniel Hawthorne

The first National Historic Site ever designated, preserving the wharves of early American sea trade; Hawthorne worked in its Custom House.

WhereMassachusetts

Established1974

The first federal armory, birthplace of the interchangeable-parts manufacturing that powered the American Industrial Revolution.

WhereNew Hampshire

Established1964

Key personAugustus Saint-Gaudens

The home, studios, and gardens of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the leading American sculptor of the Gilded Age.

WhereNew York

Established1938

Key personHoratio Gates

The 1777 American victory that convinced France to join the war — widely called the turning point of the Revolution.

WhereRhode Island

Established1986

Key personSamuel Slater

The "birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution," where Slater Mill launched U.S. textile manufacturing.

WhereRhode Island

Established1965

Key personRoger Williams

Honors the founder of Providence and Rhode Island, a pioneer of religious liberty and the separation of church and state.

WhereVermont

Established1998

Key personGeorge Perkins Marsh

The only national park devoted to conservation history — three families and the idea of stewarding the land.

WhereMaryland

Established1971

A 184-mile towpath preserving the canal that once carried coal and goods along the Potomac River.

WhereMaryland

Established1925

Key personFrancis Scott Key

The 1814 defense that moved Francis Scott Key to write "The Star-Spangled Banner" — the only site ranked a national monument and historic shrine.

WhereMaryland

Established1948

Once one of the largest houses in America — a Georgian mansion whose grandeur was built on enslaved and indentured labor.

WhereMaryland

Established2013

Key personHarriet Tubman

The Eastern Shore landscape where Tubman was born, escaped slavery, and returned again and again to lead others to freedom.

WhereMaryland

Established1978

Key personThomas Stone

Home of a Maryland signer of the Declaration of Independence.

WherePennsylvania

Established1938

Key personBenjamin Franklin

The nation's official memorial to Franklin, seated beneath the dome of Philadelphia's Franklin Institute.

WherePennsylvania

Established1980

Key personEdgar Allan Poe

The Philadelphia home Poe kept during his most productive years.

WherePennsylvania

Established1938

A restored 19th-century iron-making village showing how early American industry and rural life fit together.

WherePennsylvania

Established1948

Key personThomas Jefferson

"America's most historic square mile" — Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, where the Declaration and the Constitution were signed.

WherePennsylvania

Established1972

Key personThaddeus Kosciuszko

The smallest unit in the entire system, honoring the Polish engineer who fortified Saratoga and West Point for the Revolution.

WhereVirginia

Established1955

Key personRobert E. Lee

The hilltop mansion above Arlington Cemetery — and the story of the enslaved people who lived there before it became a memorial.

WhereVirginia

Established1930

Links Jamestown, the first permanent English colony, with Yorktown, where the Revolution was decisively won.

WhereVirginia

Established1927

Preserves four major Civil War battlefields — some of the deadliest ground of the entire war.

WhereVirginia

Established1930

Key personGeorge Washington

Marks the Popes Creek plantation where Washington was born in 1732.

WhereVirginia

Established1930

Key personGeorge Washington

A landscaped parkway preserving the Potomac shoreline and Washington's memory from Mount Vernon to the capital.

WhereVirginia

Established1966

Where the Potomac drops in roaring falls and rushes through Mather Gorge, minutes from Washington.

WhereVirginia

Key personJohn Smith

The site of the first permanent English settlement in America, founded 1607 — it carries its own passport stamp, separate from Colonial NHP.

WhereVirginia

Established1978

Key personMaggie L. Walker

Home of the first Black woman to charter a bank in the United States — a civil-rights and business pioneer.

WhereVirginia

Established1936

The largest protected piedmont forest in the region — once a Depression-era recreation camp and a WWII spy-training site.

WhereVirginia

Established1935

Worn Blue Ridge farmland restored to forest, threaded by Skyline Drive along the mountain crest.

WhereWest Virginia

Established1988

A protected free-flowing river cutting a deep, wild gorge through the Appalachians.

WhereWest Virginia

Established1988

Protects one of the world's premier whitewater rivers, released each autumn from Summersville Dam.

WhereWest Virginia

Established1944

Key personJohn Brown

Where John Brown's 1859 raid helped ignite the Civil War, at the dramatic meeting of two rivers and three states.

WhereWest Virginia

Established1978

Redesignated the nation's newest national park in 2020, protecting one of the oldest rivers on the continent and its rugged gorge.

WhereDelaware

Established2013

Delaware's first national park unit, telling the story of the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

WhereDistrict of Columbia

Established1976

A quiet lakeside park on the Mall, with a memorial to the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence.

WhereDistrict of Columbia

Established1970

Key personAbraham Lincoln

The theater where Lincoln was shot on April 14, 1865 — still an active, working theater today, alongside the museum and the house across the street where he died.

WhereDistrict of Columbia

Established1997

Key personFranklin D. Roosevelt

Four outdoor "rooms" of granite and waterfalls tracing FDR's four terms through the Depression and World War II.

WhereDistrict of Columbia

Established1995

Nineteen steel soldiers on patrol honor those who served in "the Forgotten War."

WhereDistrict of Columbia

Established1922

Key personAbraham Lincoln

The marble temple to the sixteenth president — backdrop to Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

WhereDistrict of Columbia

Established2011

Key personMartin Luther King Jr.

A figure emerging from a "Stone of Hope" — the first memorial on the Mall to a Black American and a man of peace.

WhereDistrict of Columbia

Established1965

"America's front yard" — the Lincoln, Washington, and war memorials at the symbolic heart of the nation.

WhereDistrict of Columbia

Established1961

The White House and its grounds — home to every U.S. president since John Adams.

WhereDistrict of Columbia

Established1982

Maya Lin's black granite wall, inscribed with more than 58,000 names — a place of reflection and mourning.

WhereDistrict of Columbia

Established2004

Honors the 16 million who served in the Second World War, at the center of the National Mall.

WhereDistrict of Columbia

A landmark clock-tower building on Pennsylvania Avenue, saved from demolition and kept in public hands by the Park Service.

WhereDistrict of Columbia · Washington, D.C.

Key personThomas Jefferson

Honors the author of the Declaration of Independence and the nation's third president, on the Tidal Basin among the cherry trees.

WhereDistrict of Columbia · Washington, D.C.

Key personGeorge Washington

The marble obelisk honoring the first president — for decades the tallest structure in the world.

WhereGeorgia

Established1890

The first and largest national military park, preserving the 1863 Civil War battlefields that opened the "gateway to the Deep South."

WhereGeorgia

Established1924

Where rifled cannon breached its "impregnable" brick walls in 1862 — instantly making masonry forts obsolete worldwide.

WhereGeorgia

Established1980

Key personMartin Luther King Jr.

King's birthplace, his Ebenezer Baptist Church, and his tomb — the heart of the civil-rights movement in Atlanta.

WhereKentucky

Established1916

Key personAbraham Lincoln

Protects the log-cabin site of Lincoln's 1809 birth — one of the first efforts to memorialize a president's humble origins.

WhereKentucky

Established1940

Key personDaniel Boone

The mountain pass that funneled hundreds of thousands of pioneers west through the Appalachians on the Wilderness Road.

WhereKentucky

Established1941

The longest known cave system on Earth — over 400 mapped miles of passages.

WhereMississippi

Established1971

Barrier-island beaches, historic coastal forts, and marshes strung along the Gulf of Mexico.

WhereNorth Carolina

Established1936

"America's Favorite Drive" — a 469-mile scenic parkway linking Shenandoah to the Great Smoky Mountains.

WhereNorth Carolina

Established1934

The most-visited national park, protecting one of the most biodiverse temperate forests on Earth.

WhereSouth Carolina

Established2003

Protects the largest intact tract of old-growth bottomland hardwood forest in the Southeast — some of the tallest trees in the East.

WhereSouth Carolina

Established1929

Key personDaniel Morgan

Daniel Morgan's 1781 double-envelopment, a tactical masterpiece that shattered a British force in the Carolina backcountry.

WhereSouth Carolina

Established1948

Where the first shots of the Civil War were fired in April 1861, in Charleston Harbor.

WhereTennessee

Established1927

One of the Civil War's bloodiest battles by percentage; the hard-won Union victory lifted Northern morale at the close of 1862.

WhereNorth Carolina

Established1917

Key personNathanael Greene

The 1781 battle that bled Cornwallis's army so badly it set up the British surrender at Yorktown months later.

WhereSouth Carolina

Established1988

Key personCharles Pinckney

Country home of a principal drafter and signer of the U.S. Constitution.

WhereIndiana

Established1966

Protects rare dune-and-swale habitat along Lake Michigan — among the most botanically diverse of all the national parks.

WhereMinnesota

Established1937

Key personGeorge Catlin

The quarries are still worked, by hand and by tribal members only — a monument that protects a living practice rather than a ruin, as its 1937 law required.

WhereOhio

Established1974

A reclaimed river valley between Cleveland and Akron — a story of nature's recovery from heavy industry.

WhereIllinois

Established2015

Key personGeorge Pullman

The planned company town at the center of the 1894 Pullman Strike and the rise of the American labor movement.

WhereMinnesota

Established1988

A 72-mile corridor of the Mississippi through the Twin Cities — a national park unit running straight through a metropolitan area, river and city sharing the same banks.

WhereLouisiana

Established1978

Bayous, a War of 1812 battlefield, and the living Cajun and Creole cultures of the Mississippi Delta.

WhereLouisiana

Established1994

Key personLouis Armstrong

Celebrates the birthplace of jazz — America's original art form — in the streets where it was born.

WhereNew Mexico

Established1930

Protects one of the world's most spectacular cave systems, with a vast underground chamber and a nightly bat flight.

WhereNew Mexico

Established1933

The world's largest gypsum dune field — a surreal, ever-shifting sea of white sand.

WhereTexas

Established1966

Commemorates the peaceful 1963 settlement of a century-long border dispute between the United States and Mexico.

WhereTexas

Established1972

Protects the world's most extensive Permian fossil reef and the highest peak in Texas.

WhereArizona

Established1972

Lake Powell and the red-rock canyons of the Colorado River, on the Utah–Arizona border.

WhereColorado

Established1923

Key personJesse Walter Fewkes

Stone towers on the Colorado-Utah line, called the finest ancient masonry in the country, with portholes and doorways aligned to the movement of the sun.

WhereColorado

Established1906

Key personVirginia McClurg

The first national park set aside for the works of people rather than scenery — nearly 5,000 sites, won by two women who campaigned for decades to get it.

WhereColorado

Established1919

Key personHenry Van Kleeck

Roughly 600 rooms left deliberately unexcavated — held in reserve for archaeologists not yet born and methods not yet invented.

WhereMontana

Established1910

Key personGeorge Bird Grinnell

The Crown of the Continent, and a clock you can read: of roughly 80 glaciers here in 1850, 26 are left, every one of them shrinking.

WhereMontana

Established1991

Key personGeorge Armstrong Custer

Carried Custer's name for forty-five years until Congress renamed it in 1991 and ordered an Indian Memorial — the only one to the Native experience that Congress has ever mandated.

WhereNorth Dakota

Established1966

Key personKenneth McKenzie

Never a military fort — the most profitable fur post on the upper Missouri, where ten Northern Plains nations traded and Catlin and Bodmer painted the West before photography.

WhereNorth Dakota

Established1974

Key personSakakawea

Hidatsa earthlodge towns that worked as a continental trade crossroads, and where Lewis and Clark met Sakakawea five years before smallpox emptied them in 1837.

WhereNorth Dakota

Established1978

Key personTheodore Roosevelt

The only national park named for a person — the badlands where a grieving young Roosevelt went to ranch and came back a conservationist.

WhereSouth Dakota

Established1978

Key personPeter Norbeck

The richest bed of Oligocene mammal fossils on earth, eroding out of mixed-grass prairie that only began cutting itself into spires about half a million years ago.

WhereSouth Dakota

Established1908

Key personHerb Conn

Over 220 miles surveyed, and the airflow says only a twentieth has been found — two rock climbers mapped most of the route visitors walk today.

WhereSouth Dakota

Established1999

The only park unit devoted to the Cold War: a launch control capsule, and a silo where you look through glass at a missile still standing in its tube.

WhereSouth Dakota

Established1925

Key personGutzon Borglum

Fourteen years of carving, ninety percent of it done with dynamite, and not one worker killed — on a mountain the Lakota know as the Six Grandfathers.

WhereSouth Dakota

Established1903

Key personAlvin McDonald

The eighth national park and the first anywhere to protect a cave — 167 miles of passage under one square mile of prairie, holding most of the world's boxwork.

WhereUtah

Established1971

Key personAlexander Ringhoffer

More than 2,000 arches in 120 square miles, the densest concentration on earth — standing because salt buried far below cracked the rock above into fins.

WhereUtah

Established1964

Key personBates Wilson

Won by a park superintendent who cooked dutch-oven dinners at desert campfires until the officials who could authorize a park finally said yes.

WhereUtah

Established1971

Key personEphraim Pectol

An 87-mile wrinkle in the earth's crust, so impassable that travelers borrowed a sailor's word and called it a reef — with settlers' orchards you can still pick fruit from.

WhereUtah

Established1910

One of the world's largest natural bridges, long held sacred by the Native peoples of the Colorado Plateau.

WhereWyoming

Established1906

Key personTheodore Roosevelt

The first national monument in the country, proclaimed ten years before the Park Service existed — and sacred to Northern Plains nations long before that.

WhereWyoming

Established1872

The world's first national park, set aside in 1872 to protect its geysers, canyons, and wildlife — the idea that launched the entire national-park movement.

WhereWyoming

Established1929

The jagged Teton Range rising straight from the valley floor, just south of Yellowstone.

WhereArizona

Established1919

Key personTheodore Roosevelt

A mile-deep record of two billion years of Earth's history; Roosevelt fought to protect it, urging Americans to "leave it as it is."

WhereArizona

Established1909

Three 13th-century villages built inside sandstone alcoves fed by seeping springs; reaching Keet Seel, the largest in Arizona, still takes a permit and a 17-mile walk.

WhereArizona

Established1930

Protected because a film company proposed dynamiting the cinder cone for a landslide scene in 1928, and the people of Flagstaff refused to let it happen.

WhereArizona

Established1915

A hundred or so people lived in ledges cut into the limestone here around 1100, farming the rim above; the trail down drops 185 feet past 25 of their rooms.

WhereArizona

Established1924

A 104-room pueblo with a ball court and a blowhole that breathes, trading for copper bells and macaws from Mesoamerica — and built on ash from the eruption next door.

WhereCalifornia

Established1994

The hottest, driest, and lowest place in North America.

WhereCalifornia

Established1976

Key personEugene O'Neill

Tao House, where the only American playwright ever to win the Nobel wrote Long Day's Journey Into Night and The Iceman Cometh.

WhereCalifornia

Established1970

A brick Civil War fort tucked beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, guarding San Francisco Bay.

WhereCalifornia

Established1972

One of the largest urban parks in the world — from Alcatraz to the Marin Headlands around San Francisco Bay.

WhereCalifornia

Established1964

Key personJohn Muir

The wilderness advocate's actual house — a Victorian on a working fruit ranch, where he wrote in a room the family called the scribble den.

WhereCalifornia

Established1994

Where two deserts meet, protecting the iconic Joshua trees and their fragile ecosystems.

WhereCalifornia

Established1940

Key personJohn Muir

Guards giant sequoia groves and one of the deepest canyons in North America.

WhereCalifornia

Established1916

Preserves a still-active volcanic landscape where all four types of volcano in the world can be found in one park.

WhereCalifornia

Established1925

Key personKintpuash

A natural fortress of trenches and lava caves where about 150 Modoc held out for five months against an army that outnumbered them ten to one.

WhereCalifornia

Established1992

The WWII camp where Japanese Americans were unjustly incarcerated — preserved so the injustice is never forgotten.

WhereCalifornia

Established1908

Key personJohn Muir

An old-growth coast redwood grove named for John Muir, saved from logging just north of San Francisco.

WhereCalifornia

Established2013

Key personSchuyler Hain

Spires left from an ancient volcanic field, and a release site that helped bring the California condor back after every wild bird was taken into captivity in 1987.

WhereCalifornia

Established1992

Key personThurgood Marshall

An explosion killed 320 men in 1944; when survivors refused to keep loading under the same conditions, 50 were convicted of mutiny — and cleared only in 2024.

WhereCalifornia

Established1968

Protects the tallest trees on Earth — the last great stands of old-growth coast redwoods.

WhereCalifornia

Established2000

Key personBetty Reid Soskin

Richmond's shipyards launched 747 ships and quadrupled the town; a ranger who had worked in a segregated union hall told that fuller story here until she retired at 100.

WhereCalifornia

Established1978

The largest urban national park, protecting Mediterranean-climate wilderness right beside Los Angeles.

WhereCalifornia

Established1890

Key personJohn Muir

The nation's second national park, home to the giant sequoias — the largest living trees on Earth by volume.

WhereCalifornia

Established2019

The largest of the ten WWII camps, made a segregation center in 1943 for those called disloyal — with a stockade inside it whose walls still carry the prisoners' writing.

WhereCalifornia

Established1890

Key personJohn Muir

Its granite cliffs and giant sequoias inspired John Muir's crusade for wilderness and helped shape the very idea of a national park.

WhereNevada

Established1986

Key personAbsalom Lehman

In 1964 a researcher cut down a bristlecone pine here and counted 4,862 rings; the oldest known tree on earth is the reason the rest of them are protected now.

WhereNevada

Established1964

Key personElwood Mead

The country's first national recreation area — invented to answer a brand-new question: what do you do with the lake that appears behind a dam?

WhereNevada

Established2014

Key personJill DeStefano

The largest open-air Ice Age fossil site in the Mojave, protected after North Las Vegas neighbors found bones in the wash and spent eight years arguing for it.

WhereAlaska

Established1917

Guards North America's tallest peak and a vast subarctic wilderness of grizzlies, caribou, and wolves.

WhereAlaska

Established1980

The northernmost national park — an untouched Arctic wilderness with no roads and no trails at all.

WhereAlaska

Established1980

Where the Harding Icefield spills glaciers into the sea, amid whales, puffins, and sea otters.

WhereAlaska

Established1980

Protects the Yukon River corridor and Gold Rush history deep in Alaska's interior.

WhereIdaho

Established1988

Granite spires where a quarter-million California-bound emigrants passed, many signing the rock in axle grease — two neighboring formations here differ in age by billions of years.

WhereIdaho

Established2002

Key personRobert Limbert

Lava so otherworldly that Apollo astronauts trained on it; the Great Rift last erupted about 2,000 years ago and is considered likely to erupt again.

WhereIdaho

Established2008

More than 13,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated here between 1942 and 1945, in a camp that was briefly one of the largest cities in Idaho.

WhereIdaho

Established1965

Key personChief Joseph

Thirty-eight sites across four states holding more than 11,000 years of Nimiipuu presence, and the 1,200-mile flight of 1877 that ended forty miles short of Canada.

WhereOregon

Established1902

Protects the deepest lake in the United States, cradled in the collapsed caldera of an ancient volcano, Mount Mazama.

WhereWashington

Established1978

Key personIsaac Ebey

The first national historical reserve and still the only one — a working Whidbey Island farmscape held intact although the Park Service owns almost none of it.

WhereWashington

Established1976

Key personErastus Brainerd

Seattle had no gold; it had publicity. One newspaperman's campaign sold the city as the only gateway north, and about 70,000 stampeders outfitted here on their way to the Yukon.

WhereWashington

Established1968

Wraps the head of the third-deepest lake in the country and Stehekin, a village no road reaches: you arrive by boat, floatplane, or on foot.

WhereWashington

Established2015

Key personFranklin T. Matthias

Hanford's B Reactor went critical in 1944 as the world's first full-scale nuclear reactor, on land cleared of farm towns and tribal access with thirty days' notice.

WhereWashington

Established1899

Key personJohn Muir

The fifth national park, and an active volcano carrying 28 named glaciers — more ice than anywhere else in the contiguous states, feeding rivers in every direction.

WhereWashington

Established1968

Key personPatrick Goldsworthy

Over 300 glaciers, more than the rest of the United States outside Alaska, protected after an eleven-year campaign by volunteers who would not let the idea drop.

WhereWashington

Established1938

Key personFranklin D. Roosevelt

Protects temperate rainforest, glaciated peaks, and wild Pacific coast; FDR pushed to enlarge and protect it.

WhereWashington

Established1968

Key personJ.D. Ross

The compromise that let a wilderness and a power grid share one valley — a corridor cut through the park for three Seattle City Light dams, still lighting the city 80 miles away.

WhereWashington

Established1963

Key personMarcus Whitman

An 1836 mission turned Oregon Trail way station, and the site of the 1847 killings that followed a measles epidemic — an act the Cayuse understood as their own law.

WhereWashington

Established2013

Key personWing Luke

The only community-run museum devoted entirely to pan-Asian Pacific American history, named for the first Asian American elected to office in the Pacific Northwest.

WhereAlabama

Links the churches, schools, and streets across the South where the civil-rights movement was fought and won.

WhereConnecticut

Established2009

A 215-mile ridgeline trail over the traprock hills of Connecticut and Massachusetts.

WhereGeorgia

Established1987

Retraces the forced removal of the Cherokee and other Southeastern nations to Indian Territory in the 1830s.

WhereMaine

Established1968

The 2,190-mile footpath along the Appalachian crest from Georgia to Maine.

WhereMaryland

Established2008

Key personFrancis Scott Key

A 560-mile land and water route through the 1814 campaign that burned Washington and ended at Fort McHenry, where the anthem got its words.

WhereMaryland

A national program connecting the sites and stories of those who escaped slavery — and those who risked everything to help them.

WhereMissouri

Established1978

Follows the 3,700-mile route of the Corps of Discovery from the Mississippi to the Pacific and back.

WhereNew Mexico

Established2000

The 1,600-mile "Royal Road" that linked Mexico City to Santa Fe for more than two centuries.

WhereOregon

Established1978

Key personEzra Meeker

2,250 miles of wagon road, saved because a man who walked it west in 1852 drove it back east by ox team at seventy-six to make the country notice it was disappearing.

WhereVirginia

Established2006

Key personJohn Smith

A water trail tracing Smith's 1607–09 voyages mapping the Chesapeake Bay.

WhereVirginia

A developing network of trails along the Potomac corridor, from the Chesapeake Bay to the Allegheny Highlands.

WhereVirginia

Traces the service of the roughly 200,000 Black soldiers and sailors who fought for the Union and for their own freedom.

WhereVirginia

Established2009

The 680-mile route American and French armies marched to the decisive victory at Yorktown in 1781.

WhereWashington

Established1992

Some 8,000 miles of ruts, graves, and landmarks left by more than 200,000 people who walked west in the 1840s and 50s — the largest mass migration in American history.

WhereWisconsin

Established1980

Key personRay Zillmer

Traces the edge of the last continental glacier across Wisconsin, past moraines and kettles — imagined by a Milwaukee lawyer who died twenty years before Congress agreed.