Congressional Monuments and Memorials

Not every national monument began with a presidential proclamation under the Antiquities Act. Title 16 also contains a large cluster of statutes for congressionally created monuments, memorials, and historic sites. These laws cover places such as Perry's Victory and International Peace Memorial, Fort Frederica, Whitman Mission, Fort McHenry, Fort Vancouver, Saint Croix Island International Historic Site, and the former Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, now Gateway Arch National Park. Taken together, they show Congress using monument and memorial designations to preserve military, diplomatic, exploratory, architectural, and symbolic sites one unit at a time.

Current Law (2026)

By the Numbers

• Gateway Arch: 630-foot stainless steel arch completed in 1965, the tallest man-made monument in the U.S.; the $463 million CityArchRiver renovation (completed 2018) removed the highway between the arch and the Mississippi River and redesigned the underground museum; draws approximately 2 million visitors/year
• Fort McHenry: the 1814 British bombardment that inspired Francis Scott Key to write "The Star-Spangled Banner" occurred here; the fort receives approximately 700,000 visitors/year and is one of the most visited NPS heritage sites in the Mid-Atlantic
• Perry's Victory and International Peace Memorial: the 352-foot Doric column on South Bass Island in Lake Erie was completed in 1915 to commemorate both the 1813 Battle of Lake Erie and the subsequent century of U.S.-British-Canadian peace — it marks the longest undefended international border in history; accessible only by ferry in season
• Congressional vs. Antiquities Act monuments: since the Antiquities Act's passage in 1906, presidents have proclaimed approximately 130 national monuments unilaterally; dozens of additional memorial and monument units exist because Congress passed individual enabling statutes — giving them a different legal foundation than presidential proclamations
• Scale range: congressional monuments include some of the country's most-visited sites (Gateway Arch, Fort McHenry) and some that receive fewer than 50,000 visitors/year but carry outsized diplomatic or heritage significance — Perry's Victory being the clearest example, where the peace symbolism matters more than visitor volume
• Redesignation track record: at least a dozen current NPS units that have a "National Park" or "National Historical Park" designation in their public name began statutory life as a "National Monument" or "National Memorial" — the legal evolution is archived in Title 16 through the original enabling acts

How This Differs From the Antiquities Act

These are legislative monuments, not proclamation monuments. The Antiquities Act lets a President create a national monument unilaterally. This Title 16 cluster instead reflects Congress passing unit-specific statutes.

The emphasis is often commemorative and institutional. Many of these laws deal with museums, markers, memorial construction, commissions, donations, and historic-site development in a way that looks more like bespoke heritage legislation than broad land-withdrawal authority.

Redesignation is a recurring theme. Several places in this cluster later changed names or statuses. Some moved from monument to historic site, or from memorial to national park, while keeping their older statutory lineage in Title 16.

Major Patterns

International peace and diplomatic memory

The very first sections in the cluster include Perry's Victory and International Peace Memorial at 16 U.S.C. §§ 433a-433f-1, a site that commemorates both the Battle of Lake Erie and the long peace between the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. This is a good example of Congress using a memorial unit to express foreign-relations symbolism as well as battlefield remembrance.

Forts, missions, and early historic sites

Congress used monument and historic-site statutes to preserve places such as:

• Fort Frederica
• Whitman Mission
• Fort McHenry
• Fort Vancouver

These laws frequently authorize acquisition of surrounding land, erection of markers or museums, and administration under NPS law. The result is a federal historic-site system built through dozens of site-specific preservation bills.

Monument-to-park and monument-to-site transitions

This cluster also captures the legal afterlife of redesignated places. The statutes include examples like:

• Badlands, which moved from monument status to national park status
• Fort Vancouver, where later sections changed the unit name and adjusted boundaries
• Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, later redesignated as Gateway Arch National Park

These sections matter because the current public name often hides an older legislative history.

Memorial construction and commissions

Some of these laws are not mainly about a landscape boundary. They are about building and administering a specific commemorative project. The Jefferson National Expansion Memorial sections are a strong example: they include authorization, construction, rail relocation conditions, land transfer, and commission structure. In other words, this cluster includes both land-preservation statutes and project-delivery statutes.

How It Works

Most of the units in this cluster were built through public-private collaboration from the start: donated land, donated funds, and close cooperation with states, cities, and private associations rather than unilateral federal land withdrawal. The enabling acts reflect that origin by building in commemorative infrastructure — museums, interpretive markers, visitor facilities — as part of the statutory design rather than as later add-ons, because Congress intended these sites to interpret a specific event or figure from the moment of establishment. Boundary revision is a near-universal feature: even small sites acquired adjacent parcels later to protect interpretive context, accommodate visitor infrastructure, or incorporate newly recognized significant resources. Gateway Arch's unusual history — it was established as a national monument, then a memorial, then redesignated as a national park in 2018 — illustrates how the commemorative cluster has evolved in name and status while the underlying enabling statute continued to govern management throughout, making the statutory lineage of any individual unit more complex than its current NPS designation suggests.

How It Affects You

If you're researching a specific NPS memorial or monument site: Don't assume the Antiquities Act is the legal foundation. Many NPS heritage sites — including Gateway Arch, Fort McHenry, Perry's Victory, and Whitman Mission — exist because Congress passed unit-specific enabling statutes, not because a president proclaimed them monuments. The practical consequence: the legal history of the unit (what it can do, what it can acquire, what it must preserve) is embedded in a Title 16 subchapter that often predates modern NPS law. If you're doing land, permit, or interpretive work at one of these sites, finding and reading that enabling act — not just the general NPS organic act — is where the binding language lives. See also National Military Parks and Battlefields and National Historical Parks.

If you work in historic preservation, museums, or public history: This cluster illustrates how Congress blends land acquisition, interpretive planning, memorial design, and intergovernmental partnership in a single enabling statute. Fort McHenry's statute, for example, authorizes both land acquisition and museum development — which is why the visitor center and the fort itself are part of an integrated federally managed site rather than a state-owned battlefield with a federal overlay. When you're seeking federal partnership for a preservation or interpretation project, knowing whether congressional monument law or Antiquities Act law applies changes which office in NPS you work with and what the legal authorities for your project look like.

If you visit Gateway Arch: The CityArchRiver project that opened in 2018 — removing I-70 from the waterfront, redesigning the underground museum, and reconnecting the arch to the Mississippi River — was one of the largest urban NPS infrastructure investments in recent decades. The legal authority for the redesign traced back through the original Jefferson National Expansion Memorial enabling act (passed in 1934) through the 1984 authorization for the construction and the 2018 redesignation to "Gateway Arch National Park." That layered statutory history explains why the project took decades of federal, local, and private funding to execute — each stage required legal authority that traced back to the original enabling act.

If you follow congressional debates about monuments and memorials: The Confederate monuments controversy has put some of these enabling statutes under scrutiny. A handful of memorial statutes passed in the early-to-mid 20th century authorized construction or protection of monuments whose purpose or framing is now contested. Unlike Antiquities Act monuments (which the president can modify by proclamation), congressionally authorized monuments and memorials generally require an act of Congress to alter — which means the political debate over renaming or removing such monuments runs through Congress, not the executive branch.

State Variations

These sites are federal, but they have very different local roles:

• Urban memorial units often interact more closely with city infrastructure and tourism economies
• Mission, fort, and exploration sites may depend on state and local heritage partnerships
• International memorials and border-region sites can carry special diplomatic or regional identity significance

Recent Developments

Gateway Arch's 2018 transformation is the most significant recent chapter in congressional monument history. The CityArchRiver project — a public-private partnership that ultimately cost $463 million — physically reconnected the arch grounds to the Mississippi River by rerouting I-70 into a tunnel, redesigned the underground museum at the base of the arch, and triggered the formal redesignation from "Jefferson National Expansion Memorial" to "Gateway Arch National Park." The redesignation was not just a name change: it reflected Congress's recognition that the site had grown from a commemorative project into a full-scale urban park. Gateway Arch now draws approximately 2 million visitors/year and is cited by urban planners as a model for reconnecting downtown waterfronts through NPS partnership.

DOGE-era NPS budget pressures are falling unevenly on smaller memorial units. The Trump administration's 2025 federal workforce restructuring and NPS staffing reductions have hit smaller memorial sites — those receiving fewer than 100,000 visitors/year — harder than high-traffic parks, because their operations are already lean. Perry's Victory and International Peace Memorial (accessible only by ferry to South Bass Island in Lake Erie) has limited ability to absorb staffing cuts without reducing season length or interpretation quality. Several congressional monument units depend on partnerships with state historic preservation offices and local commissions that become harder to sustain when federal staffing is reduced. Congressional monument law creates these units but does not guarantee their funding — appropriations remain the constraining variable.

The Confederate monuments controversy keeps congressional enabling statutes in the news. Unlike Antiquities Act monuments (modifiable by presidential proclamation), congressionally created monuments and memorials require an act of Congress to alter, rename, or remove. Several early-20th-century enabling statutes authorized memorials whose purpose or framing is now contested. The legal path to changing them runs entirely through Congress — executive action cannot reach a statutory memorial the way it can reach a proclamation monument — which means the political debate plays out on a different timeline and through different institutional channels than debates about presidential monuments like Bears Ears or Grand Staircase-Escalante.