The Sunday Story: Off The Mark, an NPR investigation into America's historical markers

Across America, history is often recorded on small markers.

You've probably seen them on the sides of roads, in front of buildings, in the middle

of nowhere.

There are more than 180,000 of these historical markers telling the country's story.

NPR's investigations correspondent Laura Sullivan has been examining these markers

and asking a lot of questions.

Laura joins us now to talk about what she's found.

Hey, Laura.

Like what got you interested in this particular topic?

around and I started reading all of these markers.

And some were interesting and some were a little bit random and some were really confusing.

And then I started reading this one about a Confederate soldier who had hid under a

house and I thought, okay, who wrote this?

Like, who is writing these markers?

Are these markers even true?

And then I kind of went down a rabbit hole.

I mean, I close my eyes at night and historical markers appear.

But my partner and NPR's Nick McMillan and I were able to take a giant database crowdsourced

by hobbyists from all over the country.

And we started analyzing the nation's markers, looking for patterns, curiosities, problems.

In many cases, history has been distorted.

You see offensive lies that live with impunity.

But we also found curiosities.

We found humor, joy, and of course, a lot of errors.

And some of them are as funny as they are strange.

So what were some of those strange things you found?

We have three different states that claim to have been the first to use anesthesia,

both Kentucky and Missouri claim to be the home of Daniel Boone's bones.

Maryland and New Jersey both claim to have sent the first telegram.

Well, some historian knows.

But the thing is, and what's curious about historical markers is that they can say anything

that a state or a private group or even an individual wants them to say.

We found more than 35,000 different groups or individuals or people in this country have

put up markers.

But really markers began to take hold in the early part of the 20th century.

Cars were becoming more affordable, highways were getting built, people were getting out

into the open road for the first time.

you really do picture them kind of on the side of the road.

And sometimes they're stone, sometimes wood.

One of my favorites is in Texas, which has a marker claiming to be the home of the first

successful airplane flight.

So what is that marker doing in Texas?

I'm sure that people would dispute that.

What other sort of curious markers are out there?

Florida marks a dead alligator named Old Joe.

California marks a dead horse also named Old Joe.

California thought they had a dead mastodon, but the marker then explained that it was

actually a dead circus elephant.

And we also found markers to ghosts.

There are markers for two witches, one vampire, there was a wizard.

There's also a couple, a New Hampshire marker says may have been abducted by aliens.

But mostly markers highlight the actions of completely dead humans.

For example, Arizona marks the grave of a man, the local town wrongly hanged for stealing

a horse in 1882.

It says he was right, we was wrong, now he's gone.

Oh my goodness.

So I mean, we have had a real reckoning over how history is told in this country.

And the symbols that we use like monuments and street names, there have been a lot of

fights over this.

Have historical markers drawn that sort of debate?

And that's because aside from the hobbyists who've maintained the database for fun, there's

no national repository of markers.

And many state officials even told us that there was no way to know how many markers

are even in their state, you know, what land they sit on or what's on them.

We found markers all across this country that tell a version of history that's distorted

or even outright false.

stories behind their complicated point of view.

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On the TED Radio Hour, MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle, her latest research into the intimate

relationships people are having with chatbots.

Technologies that say, I care about you.

I love you.

I'm here for you.

Take care of me.

The pros and cons of artificial intimacy.

That's on the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

She's been investigating the nation's historical markers and to understand how America is

telling its own story.

We're heading first to Alabama.

Okay.

Let me take you to central Alabama, to Tuskegee.

It was a really rainy day.

It was storming.

And I met with city council member Johnny Ford, who was standing under an awning in

the town square.

Booker T. Washington started the National Business League here.

It's the home of the Tuskegee Airmen.

And Ford points out close to 90 percent of its residents are black.

But in the center of this square is a stone marker with two carved Confederate flags.

It says honor the brave with God as our vindicator, erected by the daughters of the Confederacy

to the Confederate soldiers of Macon County.

That is not a positive sign for us here in our community.

That's not a fair message.

It's got a gun facing north.

Ford and many of the citizens of Tuskegee have been trying to remove the stone marker

and the statue for years, but they can't.

Because the thing about this marker and thousands of others across the country is that they're

owned by private groups.

This one belongs to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group made up almost entirely

of white women.

to be used as a park for white people.

The 1906 deed, still filed across the street in the courthouse, gives the entire town square

to the United Daughters for, quote,

the purpose of converting the land into a park for white people.

Honor their dead, but not in a public place.

Put it in a cemetery.

Put it in some museum.

We found the Daughters helped erect more than 600 historical markers, far surpassing any

other Civil War heritage group.

As it constructed a national canvas to rewrite the history of the war.

These markers congratulate men for fighting for the cause, the just cause, the sacred

cause, the lost cause, which was a racist philosophy claiming, among other things, that

black people enjoyed being enslaved.

The markers herald the men's, quote,

unsurpassed heroism and patriotic devotion as they fought to break the country apart

to keep men enslaved, or what the markers call their, quote,

glorious heritage.

One in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, tells a fabricated story about a, quote,

faithful Negro.

There's one in Grayson County, Texas, which they rededicated in 1996, that says the war

efforts of Confederate soldiers will, quote,

teach future generations patriotism and Southern chivalry.

They put up at least three markers and memorials to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first

Grand Wizard of the Klan.

They even put up a marker in Concord, North Carolina, to the Klan itself.

That one's been removed.

Lately, Johnny Ford and the United Daughters have been battling in court, but Ford

isn't quite sure who he's fighting.

Who mows it and puts these benches out?

Under my administration, we've spent thousands of dollars taking care of this square.

I think they're mostly dead.

They don't pay any taxes here.

They don't live here.

Yet they want to dominate our square.

Hinton. Just one moment.

Jay Hinton is a lawyer an hour away in Montgomery.

I represent the chapter, the Tuskegee chapter of the United Daughters.

The case is pending in front of the Alabama Supreme Court.

Hinton acknowledged there are only a couple, if any, United Daughters that live in

Tuskegee or the surrounding counties.

When we looked at the group's tax records, we found most of its wealth concentrated

around its national headquarters in Richmond, Virginia, where the group has amassed

$11 million, with an annual revenue of $1 to $2 million.

When I asked why the United Daughters would want to keep a marker in a place they

don't live, in a town that doesn't want it, for soldiers who died 160 years

ago, Hinton said it's the women's choice to make.

He says despite the deed, the group has always allowed everyone to use the park.

We're we're pretty comfortable and it makes us feel

like good citizens to say that we didn't discriminate and therefore we we

think we get to keep the dirt because we're doing what we ought to be doing from a

constitutional perspective.

Nationwide, though, we found these and other markers from Confederate heritage

groups far outnumber similar markers from Union groups, with more than twice as

many. It was similar with Confederate hospitals and Confederate cemeteries.

We found Civil War markers that vilify the Union, falsify the reasons for the war

and recast Confederate soldiers as the war's true heroes.

Markers about them and the Confederacy are prolific, with more than 12,000

mentions. But while the war was fought over slaves and slavery, those words show

up only about half as many times.

As Confederate groups like the United Daughters disappeared from Tuskegee and

other areas, historical markers gave their organizations lasting and national

visibility. The United Daughters put up markers as far away as Arizona, New

Mexico, Washington, which weren't even states at the time of the war.

Officials with the group did not respond to our request for comment, but in a

statement on its website, the organization says their markers, quote,

simply represent a memorial to our forefathers who fought bravely and that its

members have, quote, stayed quietly in the background, never engaging in public

controversy. But that's not what we found.

Their archival documents show they've been steeped in racism and the power of

markers for a century.

At a conference in 1914, one of the top leaders told the members slaves were,

quote, the happiest set of people on the face of the globe and said it was the

women's job to, quote, defend the slaveholders using markers and other

methods. And they haven't stopped.

While other groups have spent the past 20 years taking Confederate symbols down,

the United Daughters helped put up 47 more markers, proof that the victors of

war do not always get to write its history.

Hello.

Which is what Brian Stevenson found when he arrived in Montgomery, Alabama, in the

1980s, long before he gained national acclaim for his work as executive director

of the Equal Justice Initiative.

When he went looking for a marker about slavery, he couldn't find one.

Confederacy, almost a preoccupation with mid-19th century history.

But you could not find the word slave, slavery or enslavement anywhere in the

city.

So in 2013, he called up the Alabama Historical Association.

He says they sounded supportive.

I asked, how do you put up a marker?

And they said, oh, just if it's truthful, just give us the information.

We'll put it up. And we went to them.

We gave them a 60 page memo documenting the history that we had investigated.

And we got an email back saying, yeah, your information is all true and correct,

but we can't put up markers about slavery.

That would be too controversial.

other Confederate groups had figured out 100 years earlier.

If you want to own the narrative, write it yourself.

The Equal Justice Initiative has now put up more than 100 markers telling the

stories of lynchings and racial terror.

relationship to honoring things that are not really honorable.

We will. We'll create a new relationship to that.

that new relationship.

Theo Moore, who at the time was the group's African-American heritage coordinator,

pulled up to a new marker the group put up to Claudette Colvin, a young black

woman who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus before Rosa Parks.

The neighborhood is run down, but the marker towers over the street, solid and

shiny.

place of importance.

Although you see what you see around you in regards to the torn down buildings on

this side of town, these type of markers is a reminder to everyone that it wasn't

once all that way.

We've been taught the same history, especially in the South, and this is how all

these stereotypes come about.

And so there's one way of basically letting people see another side of our history

than what is presented all the time, which is negativity.

Most people don't even read them.

But as he gets back in the car, he says they matter because how you tell history

shapes how you see the future.

tell these new stories, as Bryan Stevenson said, to, quote, change the narrative.

But what happens with the old narrative, especially, you know, if states don't even

know how many markers there are or where they're located?

I mean, some of them are 50 years old, some are 100 years old.

It's hard to even figure out who owns them, who owns the land that the marker sits on.

We talked to officials in Minnesota and they told us that there were more than a

thousand markers in their state and they were able to track down 206 that the state

historical society either paid for or helped put up.

So they drove out to all of them.

And when they got out there, they found that every single one of these markers had a

problem from either grammar issues to offensive language.

these other states.

recently passed laws that say no one can take down any historical marker, no matter

how old, wrong, misguided, confusing or offensive that it might be.

And in other cases, they're only telling one perspective.

said as we were wrapping up.

He told me that he tried to read most of the state markers as part of the job.

And he said lately that something's been bothering him.

North Da Soga, Loja Polka, Opelika, Tuscaloosa, that's all Native American, right?

Where, you know, where's their markers?

And their history and heritage?

Native Americans. But what we found is that the history on them often isn't theirs.

I mean, hundreds of them still call Native Americans savages, hostile or use racial

slurs.

that really glorify white settlers, but vilify Native Americans.

And I saw this on a recent day in a 170-year-old cemetery in New Ulm, Minnesota.

Society. And she took me through the cemetery.

clearing.

Yep. In front of her is a soapstone and marble marker, an obelisk, each side carved

with writing. It begins, In memory of those who fell in the defense of New Ulm in

1862.

Something by the Indians.

And I believe that that word might be massacred, massacred by the Indians.

And that is an objectionable word today.

And if there are two sides on the American frontier, NPR found the nation's

historical markers come down solidly on the side of white settlers.

We found at least 200 markers that tell an eerily similar story.

Native Americans killed innocent white settlers in cold blood.

Gebhardt knows this tale well.

the gravity of it.

You have entire families that lost their lives.

This is what the reality was for them in 1862.

It just wasn't the reality for all the people who lived here.

would have been in 1862, the tall grass prairie.

Dakotas. He's standing at the edge of an expansive field in southern Minnesota known

as Chauncey Yopi, its homeland of the Lower Sioux Indian community in an area the

federal government calls the Lower Sioux Agency.

miles.

years ago when Minnesota agreed to return 114 acres to the tribe, acknowledging the

land had never belonged to the state in the first place.

When tribal members took possession of the property, they also happened to take over

management of 22 state historical signs.

Robertson says many of them told a similar story.

And they had no defenses.

The women were violated and the children were taken, blah, blah, blah.

I mean, that's the kind of language that are on these markers.

Robertson says tribal members spent a long time considering each one and then they made

a decision. They decided to take them all down.

They decided they wanted to tell their own story.

On a recent day, I went with Robertson and a team of people as they headed out on the

trails to see how the signs were coming along.

As the crew banged new signs into the ground, they tossed the old ones into a heap on

the grass. Robertson says it wasn't just the ones that called them savages or

described violent acts that troubled him.

It was all the signs that didn't even mention them, as if the tribe's history here

hadn't happened at all.

To show what he means by this, Robertson walks over to an old stone building.

Standing next to him is Amber Annis.

She's Cheyenne River Lakota and vice president with the Minnesota Historical Society,

which is helping replace the signs.

Annis picks up the old sign.

It says Stone Warehouse across the top.

She reads the rest.

It is 43 by 23 feet, 20 feet in height, with a good substantial cellar, eight feet

deep. The cellar walls are three feet.

The first story walls, two feet, and the second story walls, 18 inches thick.

Period. That's it.

Robertson shakes his head.

The sign, with all its dimensions, isn't wrong, he says.

It's oblivious. The Stone Warehouse was the spark that started the U.S.

Dakota Wars.

establishment of the conquered status of the Dakota Nation.

of Dakotas with them.

They were known for their brilliant political and military strategy.

But after the U.S. government took their land and prohibited them from hunting or

farming, the tribe was forced to accept a treaty.

One of the things it promised was food payments from the Stone Warehouse, except

in the summer of 1862, the government, mired in the Civil War, stopped providing

food. According to letters from the time, the federal agent in charge locked the

warehouse and the main trader told the Dakotas they could, quote, eat grass or

their own dung. Facing starvation after years of broken promises, the Dakotas

declared war. What's the new, what does the new sign say?

So that would be place of storage house.

The warehouse was a central scene during the outbreak of the U.S.

Dakota War in 1862.

Its contents were burned out during the war, but the structure remained.

And as Robertson and Annis continue down the gravel path, each new sign tells

another piece of the story.

The loss of the land, the arrival of the Europeans, the decimation of the tribe.

Amber Annis says that Native Americans are used to markers telling only one of two

stories. Their ancestors were either psychopathic murderers or inept victims who

disappeared. Being Native, you grow up, wherever you go, you know it's going to be

something that's not true. I have two daughters, my children.

I think about them a lot and how when they come to places like this, they'll be able

victory over a brigade of soldiers on the river.

But Robertson and Annis know how the story ends.

The federal government marshaled hundreds of soldiers until the Dakotas surrendered,

executed 38 of them without a trial and removed the rest of the tribe from

Minnesota. Robertson says he's not trying to change that history.

He's trying to explain why it mattered.

continuing way.

That's the goal of the sign.

Then you would say, I heard something about that or I want to know more about that.

And it's going to be alive for you.

One in New Ulm tells how, quote, savages massacred nearly all the whites.

Another uses a racial slur and concludes Native Americans, quote, had no pity for

women or children.

large marker honoring the pioneers.

Absolutely.

And so if Dakota would put up a marker saying this is our homeland, they would be

absolutely correct in doing so.

told in two ways, is problematic for historians.

What if people only see one sign?

What if people want the old signs because they just like the old stories better?

One of Minnesota's most beloved settler families is, after all, that of Laura Ingalls

Wilder. What is lesser known is that for a time, the Wilders built a home on tribal

land without permission, land that belonged to the Osage Nation.

These two true stories, one of courageous families who helped build a nation and

another of Native families who lost nations, can be told together, but they rarely

are. On the back of the courthouse pioneer marker in New Ulm is the name of every

town resident who died in the U.S.

Dakota Wars fighting for their families.

We couldn't find any marker in Minnesota that lists the names of the Dakotas who

died fighting for theirs.

Darla Gebhardt said a member of the Dakotas asked her about this once.

in New Ulm think about the Dakota War?

And I said they don't.

And then this person said, well, why is that?

And I said, because we won.

white settlers, right?

Who were they written for?

The we that makes up New Ulm today is all kinds of people.

I mean, their residents are just as likely to be descendants of pioneers as they are

Native Americans.

There's immigrants, old immigrants, also new immigrants.

I mean, there's Californians who escaped COVID.

But now after a century and with so many of them, it does seem like they've become a

sort of history book for the nation.

You know, you know, kind of an analog one, to be sure.

But just like with social media, there is hate.

There's also joy as well.

And even in some rare instances, sometimes markers can unlock long forgotten

have to go back to Alabama to a dusty two lane highway outside Gadsden.

unsolved murder.

he's pulling his car onto the highway and he's taking me to a place where someone was