A quest to visit 250 historic sites
The Orangeburg Massacre Memorial at South Carolina State University. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.
By Linda Engelhard
Sun contributor
Celebrating a national anniversary is kind of similar to looking ahead at a milestone birthday, with good, bad, and sometimes ugly aspects. Yes, I’m still breathing but not everything in my past is cause for a party.
My husband John and I had escaped snowmageddon and were heading toward the coast of Georgia, surrounded by Civil War history on the way. Without snow to shovel, we began to contemplate what a genuine celebration of the Declaration of Independence might look like for us.
We love this country. That said, we also love justice, honesty, kindness, generosity—the values we grew up with that seem to be less embraced by our country in 2026. We settled on a quest to celebrate by learning more history and visiting 250 historic sites by the end of the year.
The very first site we visited was at South Carolina State University. A security guard met us at the gate and helped us find the Orangeburg Massacre Memorial on the campus map. We made our way to Legacy Plaza and found a substantial brick and steel structure surrounding the busts of three handsome young men: Samuel Hammond, Delano Middleton, and Henry Smith. In 1968, they were killed and 28 others were injured by police while protesting on campus about segregation at the local bowling alley.
John and I were college students in the late 1960s and early ’70s, so watching news stories and reading about the horrible killing of four white students at Kent State in 1970 are clear memories. Neither of us remembers hearing news reports about the killings at South Carolina State just two years earlier.
Making our way south, we spent a day in Charleston, first visiting Mother Emmanuel A.M.E. Church where the pastor and eight church members were murdered 11 years ago. In 1822, white citizens destroyed the building where the African Methodist Episcopal Church was meeting and hanged several church leaders involved with a slave uprising. Mother Emmanuel’s statement “grace means courage” has been tested by racism, an earthquake and a hurricane, but they continue to thrive.
Closer to the harbor, we stopped at the Old Slave Mart Museum located in part of a building that housed “Ryan’s Mart,” the last major slave market in Charleston. When the Union Army reclaimed Charleston in 1865, all slave trading was outlawed. On the day we visited, visitors of all colors filled the nearby sidewalks, a sign of hope going forward.
We journeyed on toward our destination, St. Simons Island, Georgia, a place we love to visit, but this time we looked around us with a mission. Driving through Brunswick on our way to the F.J. Torras Causeway, we stopped at the Ahmaud Arbery Memorial Park, a modest space honoring the memory of the young man gunned down for jogging in the Satilla Shores neighborhood. Even the beauty of the Low Country marshes could not erase the sadness of his death.
After getting settled and breathing in the salty St. Simons breezes, we decided to explore a building we had passed many times: the World War II Home Front Museum. Outside of the museum stands a metal marker titled “S.S. Oklahoma and Esso Baton Rouge attacked by U-123.”
Two of our grandsons accompanied us to learn more about World War II along the Georgia coast and were soon mesmerized by the interactive exhibits about radar and plane identification. All of us were amazed to learn that more Americans died along our Atlantic Coast during World War II than at the World Trade Tower bombings in 2001. Georgia has developed a World War II Heritage Trail, so we have more to learn next year.
In the northern half of St. Simons Island, we visited Fort Frederica, the preserved ruins of a town developed by James Oglethorpe and a fort where the British defended the island from attacks by Spain. And on the southern end, near the river, we walked around Gascoigne Bluff where trees were felled and shipped north to build “Old Ironsides,” the USS Constitution.
Adjoining the bluff, the Hamilton Plantation is a disquieting reminder of life prior to the Civil War. Long-staple cotton was grown and harvested by slaves and shipped from the plantation’s wharf. We questioned why neighborhoods throughout the South still choose to include “plantation” in their names.
As we drove north toward our native state, we realized that we need to work harder to learn more Michigan history and wondered how many historical sites we could find on our return route. We visited the Underground Railroad Sculpture last year, but Battle Creek wasn’t on our route this time. In Ann Arbor, we found a plaque honoring the Michigan Antislavery Society founded in 1836 at the First Presbyterian Church, moving to the First Congregational Church in 1847.
On the west side of the state, we visited the Captain Walker’s Branded Hand monument at the Evergreen Cemetery in Muskegon. Captain Walker was a staunch abolitionist sea captain who helped slaves escape from Florida to the Bahamas. When he was caught, his captors branded his hand with “SS” to signify slave stealer, and he spent a year in solitary confinement. Supporters from the North helped him pay a fine for his release, and until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, he traveled the country showing his hand and exposing the cruelties of slavery. He had earned his retirement on a fruit farm near Muskegon.
Our list has grown to 114 sites, nearly halfway to our goal, but it’s already July and the pressure is building. Fortunately, our granddaughter will start college in New York, so we hope a fall road trip will provide opportunities to learn even more.
