National Park Service

NEW YORK - A group of families of World Trade Center victims seeks help from the National Park Service in developing the Ground Zero memorial. Proponents said the park service's expertise would help planners design the most suitable tribute and create the most compelling visitor programs. The park service - which runs the Vietnam Veterans and Gettysburg memorials - "can provide the resources and funding that would optimize" the World Trade Center memorial, said Louise Lo Presti, who is advising the Coalition of 9/11 Family Groups.

Some of Dundalk's War of 1812 sites - including Battle Acre Park and North Point State Battlefield - share North Point Road with rowhouses and strip malls. But nearby, quiet Charlesmont and Bear Creek parks offer undeveloped land also tied to the Battle of North Point, where British and American troops clashed as the British moved toward Baltimore. "It looks exactly like it did 200 years ago," said Robert Reyes, a local historian, as he gazed out over the water from the head of Bear Creek.

THE LOSS OF an on-site superintendent, perhaps permanently, at Towson's Hampton Mansion is the latest in a long history of neglect by the National Park Service. This situation is not unique to Hampton. The National Historic Trust recently listed historic buildings owned by the National Park Service on a list of "endangered" cultural amenities.Though charged with the care of both natural and cultural resources, the park service expends more energy and money on the former. Congress' cost-cutting has not helped places like Hampton, either.

Harriet Tubman, Maryland's heroic conductor on the Underground Railroad and early leader for women's rights, may soon get the recognition she deserves if President Barack Obama accepts a proposal by Gov. Martin O'Malley, U.S. Sens. Ben Cardin and Barbara Mikulski, and Rep. Andy Harris to create the Harriet Tubman National Monument. The state's formal request for consideration of a national monument, sent to Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar last week, followed a public meeting held in Cambridge and attended by more than 80 people.

The B&O Railroad Museum has requested $1 million from a program administered by the National Park Service to help pay to restore exhibits damaged in the collapse of the roundhouse roof. The Save America's Treasures program has $30 million earmarked this year for preserving and restoring sites and collections considered national icons. The most an organization can request this year is $1 million in matching funds. Last year, no project was awarded more than $500,000. "That's a pretty big grab," Courtney B. Wilson, the B&O's executive director, said of his request.

Lytia Solomon had never met a park ranger or taken a family vacation to a national park. And growing up in Philadelphia as a "complete urban city girl," she never knew what a park ranger did. Yet the rising college sophomore with an interest in criminal justice discovered that such a career path could be right up her alley, thanks to a new initiative that's recruiting college students to help combat a looming shortage of National Park Service rangers....

The National Park Service issued its final ruling yesterday, allowing personal watercraft such as Jet Skis in two small areas off Assateague Island - a decision that environmentalists say will likely be challenged in court. The move occurs more than three years after the Park Service banned the motorized craft in national parks, and two years after a closer, site-specific look at the rules was ordered for Assateague and 21 parks and other land preserves. The approval confirms a plan developed two years ago by officials on Assateague that outlawed the fast-moving craft in most of the 22,000 acres of water under Park Service jurisdiction (up to a half-mile offshore)

KELSO, Calif. -- The Mojave National Preserve is just that: 1.4 million acres that are a preserve, not at all the same as a national park.Here among the desert tortoises, Joshua trees and cacti, you can shoot and kill the coyotes and rabbits. You can pitch your tent next to men dressed in hunter's orange and watch them gut a deer. Cowhands herd cattle into stick corrals. People drive on 1,430 miles of trails."If it has two tracks and looks like a road," says Kirsten Talken, a park service ranger, "you can probably drive on it."

The National Park Service and two nonprofit organizations signed a five-year agreement yesterday on improvements for the disabled at national parks in a ceremony at Fort McHenry.Under the pact -- signed after the demonstration of a system designed to aid blind visitors to the park -- the National Center on Accessibility will help the park service find volunteers from the Telephone Pioneers of America to help the park service complete projects it deems necessary to help the disabled."Our goal is to assist the National Park Service in projects that they've identified that they might not be able to do as part of their regular budget," said Gary Robb, executive director of the National Center on Accessibility.

GETTYSBURG, Pa. - The cannon smoke had scarcely cleared and corpses clad in blue or gray were still being dragged from the cornfields when the first curious folks came by carriage in the brutal summer of 1863."

The sun and moon will put on a spectacular show Sunday, but it won't be visible from Maryland. The first annular eclipse visible in the U.S. since 1994 will be visible across a stretch of western states. The track of optimal viewing stretches from northern California to the Texas panhandle. EarthSky.org has a nice map showing where the eclipse can be seen. In annular eclipses, the new moon passes directly in front of the sun, creating what looks like a ring of fire in the sky. Such an eclipse won't occur again until Oct. 14, 2023.

Harriet Tubman was one tough lady. She escaped slavery, fleeing an Eastern Shore plantation. She was a leader in the Underground Railroad, traveling at night under the North Star — probably along the Choptank River — hiding at safe houses along the path to freedom. During the Civil War, she saw duty as a spy, assisting Union forces that raided plantations and freed slaves along the Combahee River in South Carolina. Tubman played an outsized role in American history, a contribution that is recently (and belatedly)

Few historical figures are deserving of greater public recognition and tribute than Maryland's own Harriet Tubman. Although typically mentioned in history books as a conductor of the Underground Railroad, the many accomplishments over her long life — and her connection to her native state — are not widely known or adequately appreciated. That's why Congress should move forward with a proposal to create a national park in her name on the Eastern Shore. It is a rare opportunity to right a historical wrong — to set aside the land where Ms. Tubman was born and raised and toiled as a slave so that future generations might walk in her footsteps and develop a deeper understanding of this remarkable woman.

Owings Mills-based Carroll Tree Service Inc., has been awarded a contract to prune and preserve Elm trees at the National Mall in Washington, the firm announced Monday. The terms of the contract were not disclosed. The Baltimore County commercial tree care company was tapped by Annapolis Junction-based Corman Construction, which was hired by the National Park Service to restore the reflecting pool. Carroll will work to preserve the trees throughout the project, which is scheduled to be completed by spring 2012.

Lytia Solomon had never met a park ranger or taken a family vacation to a national park. And growing up in Philadelphia as a "complete urban city girl," she never knew what a park ranger did. Yet the rising college sophomore with an interest in criminal justice discovered that such a career path could be right up her alley, thanks to a new initiative that's recruiting college students to help combat a looming shortage of National Park Service rangers....

If your heart is set on a national park vacation this summer, now -- not June -- is the time to nail down plans. Majestic Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, for example, reports that its lodging is more than half booked for this summer. California's iconic Yosemite National Park reports heavy bookings as well. It's not uncommon for people to make reservations a year in advance at the most popular parks. Though the National Park Service projects that visits will be down slightly from 2009, these national treasures will still attract a whopping 282 million American and foreign visitors, in part spurred by Ken Burns' 2009 documentary "The National Parks: America's Best Idea."

Standing on scaffolding, wearing eye-protecting glasses and with a steel hammer in his hand, Louis Brown sweated in the humid air as he laboriously restored the stone chinks between hand-hewn logs that farmer Aaron McKenzie first erected in Howard County 145 years ago. "It gives you the feel of what they had to go through back in time," said Brown, 28, a National Park Service employee helping Howard County restore the two-story, 1860 log barn McKenzie built...

WEST ORANGE, N.J. -- If Thomas Edison could have foreseen the future, he might have invented a way to preserve his legacy.As it is, historians and archivists are trying to protect the works of America's greatest inventor from time and the elements.The Edison National Historic Site in West Orange holds the largest collection of the inventor's materials: 5.4 million artifacts, from the first phonograph to the patent for the incandescent light bulb. Edison consolidated his operations here in 1887 after he outgrew his laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J., and tired of commuting to his New York City headquarters.

The National Park Service says some boat ramps and campgrounds along the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal remain closed by debris from Potomac River flooding early in the week. Rangers said Friday that nine boat ramps from Spring Gap in Allegany County to Edward's Ferry in Montgomery County are closed. The Antietam Creek and McCoy's Ferry campgrounds are also closed, along with the Billy Goat Trail near Great Falls. Park visitors should expect rough conditions along much of the towpath. - Associated Press

WEVERTON - Sure, it doesn't look like much. But looks deceive. The soon-to-be parking lot along the Appalachian Trail, not far from Harpers Ferry and the Potomac River, is a monument to government gone stupid with our money. How else do you explain a 25-car paved lot that started with a price tag of $187,000 and ballooned to nearly a half-million bucks? But that's what happened when bureaucrats began adding bells and whistles to a slab of asphalt so that visiting Washington "dignitaries" would see a "parklike setting," but nothing so rustic as to dirty their shoes.