Dispatches From the Parks: Booker T. Washington National Monument
In between the seashores and civil war battlefields of Virginia’s coast and the mountainous hiking destinations of the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah Mountains is one of the National Park Service’s least well-known units: Booker T. Washington National Monument. The monument preserves the site where Booker T. Washington grew up as a slave but covers his entire life including his adult life where he became a major civil rights leader and educator.
My father and I traveled to the monument on our way from Richmond to the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s a pretty long drive so once we parked, we took advantage of the numerous picnic areas on the property to have some lunch. From there we entered the visitor center and watched the park video before walking through the park’s small museum. The video has pretty decent production values for a park video as they tend to be outdated and corny, but I wish the video focused a bit more on Washington’s adult life. It felt like 75% of the video was about his childhood, which makes sense as we were watching the video at the location where he spent his childhood. The museum seemed to have a lot of fun, interactive exhibits, but most of them were not active due to COVID protocols.
Our visit continued through the back doors of the visitor center, which leads directly to the Jack O Lantern Branch Trail. This is a nice two-and-a-half-mile hike that begins in the partially still operating farmland that Washington used to work on before going through numerous other types of terrain. It was actually astonishing the different environments we went through. We walked through fields, woodlands, streams and even beaches on this short hike and we were shocked by some of the things we came across, including a 19th century graveyard.
We ended up spending an entire afternoon here, which was longer than I thought we would, and we enjoyed the place a lot. There’s quite a lot to do at Booker T. Washington National Monument, so be prepared for that even though it isn’t one of the big-name parks of the National Park Service.
