Modern Community and Innovation National Historical Parks
Title 16 also contains a later generation of national historical park statutes that preserve artists' places, industrial cities, civil rights landscapes, presidential communities, science-and-technology sites, and neighborhood-scale heritage districts. These are not classic battlefield parks, and they are not just house museums either. They are best understood as modern community and innovation parks: units such as Weir Farm, Jimmy Carter, Pullman, Lyndon B. Johnson, Paterson Great Falls, Thomas Edison, Blackstone River Valley, Coltsville, First State, Dayton Aviation Heritage, Martin Luther King, Jr., Harriet Tubman, and Manhattan Project. For earlier culture-and-interpretation parks, see Cultural and Interpretive National Historical Parks; for founding-era and Revolutionary parks, see Civic and Revolutionary National Historical Parks.
Current Law (2026)
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Main units covered here | Weir Farm, Jimmy Carter, Pullman, Lyndon B. Johnson, Paterson Great Falls, Thomas Edison, Blackstone River Valley, Coltsville, First State, Dayton Aviation Heritage, Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman parks, Manhattan Project |
| Common legal themes | partnership-heavy preservation, neighborhood and industrial-district interpretation, mixed federal and nonfederal ownership, commissions and affiliated areas, and public-history programming |
| Distinctive feature | These statutes preserve modern American social, industrial, political, and scientific history in community settings rather than remote landscapes |
| Why these statutes matter | They show how elastic the historical-park form became when Congress turned to labor, civil rights, invention, urban heritage, and twentieth-century history |
What Connects These Parks
They preserve communities and institutions, not just landmarks. Pullman, Blackstone River Valley, Dayton Aviation Heritage, and Martin Luther King Jr. all depend on surrounding neighborhood or district context.
The federal role is often collaborative rather than totalizing. Many of these parks were built around partnerships, commissions, local nonprofits, or mixed ownership rather than straightforward federal acquisition.
They broaden the subject matter of park law. By the time Congress created these units, the historical-park form was being used for labor history, invention, civil rights, presidential communities, and nuclear-science history.
Major Patterns
Innovation, industry, and infrastructure
Thomas Edison National Historical Park, Paterson Great Falls, Dayton Aviation Heritage, Blackstone River Valley, and Coltsville all preserve some combination of invention, manufacturing, industrial power, and technological change. Their statutes tend to emphasize interpretation, affiliated resources, and partnership structures because the history is spread across working or formerly working landscapes.
Community-scale civil rights and social history
Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park, the two Harriet Tubman parks, and Pullman National Historical Park preserve social and civic history embedded in neighborhoods, transportation systems, and lived communities. The civil rights stories these parks preserve connect to the broader legal framework of Federal Civil Rights Crimes and the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act. These are strong examples of Congress using park law to preserve places whose importance depends on the surrounding social landscape.
Presidential and personal-place parks
Jimmy Carter, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Weir Farm represent a different variation: parks centered on a person, but designed as larger place-based narratives rather than single isolated houses. They preserve homes, surrounding landscapes, working environments, or community context.
Science and state-building landscapes
The Manhattan Project National Historical Park and First State National Historical Park show how far the category has expanded. One preserves a distributed atomic-science and wartime mobilization story across multiple states; the other preserves a constitutional and state-formation story through a small but symbolically dense set of Delaware sites.
How It Works
These parks collectively expand the NPS mission from preserving iconic landscapes to interpreting the working, civic, and intellectual history of American communities. The units are often distributed across multiple properties and districts — Thomas Edison National Historical Park, Lowell, and the Manhattan Project site span multiple locations in different states — so their legal architecture resembles a preservation network held together by statutory designation rather than a contiguous federal boundary. Most depend on partnership authority: cooperation with local governments, nonprofits, private owners, and affiliated institutions, because the subjects of interpretation (factory floors, civil rights neighborhoods, invention workshops) are embedded in living communities rather than isolated federal land. The unifying principle across all the patterns in this cluster is interpretation: the mission is public understanding of a historical theme, not simply land acquisition and preservation in place.
By the Numbers
- MLK Jr. National Historical Park (Atlanta): approximately 1 million visitors/year; preserves Sweet Auburn neighborhood including King's birth home, Ebenezer Baptist Church, and the King Center; adjacent to an active residential and commercial neighborhood, making it among the most community-embedded NPS units in the system
- Manhattan Project National Historical Park: three separate sites across three states — Oak Ridge, Tennessee (Y-12 and K-25 facilities); Los Alamos, New Mexico (the bomb design laboratory); Hanford, Washington (plutonium production reactors); authorized in 2015, still developing visitor infrastructure; unique in that DOE manages the actual nuclear facilities while NPS manages interpretation
- Pullman National Historical Park (Chicago): designated a national monument in 2015 by President Obama, redesignated as an NHP by Congress; preserves America's first planned industrial community and the site of the 1894 Pullman Strike that led to Labor Day becoming a federal holiday; located in an active Chicago neighborhood where approximately 1,500 residents still live
- Harriet Tubman National Historical Park (Auburn, NY): authorized 2014, opened 2017; preserves Tubman's home and farm, the AME Zion Church she attended, and the Thompson Memorial AME Zion Church near her final years; paired with the separately administered Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Maryland (different enabling statute and NPS unit)
- Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park (NJ): authorized 2009; preserves Alexander Hamilton's vision for American industrial self-sufficiency — the site where he directed the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures to harness the Passaic River's 77-foot waterfall for manufacturing; the falls themselves generate approximately 70 megawatts of hydroelectric power today, still functioning as Hamilton envisioned
How It Affects You
<!-- pria:personalize type="impact" -->If you're visiting or planning to visit one of these parks: These are not your typical scenic or battlefield parks. MLK Jr. NHP in Atlanta is embedded in the Sweet Auburn neighborhood — you walk past active churches, businesses, and homes to reach King's birth house. Pullman NHP in Chicago is a functioning residential neighborhood where people still live and maintain their historic homes. The visitor experience is deliberately community-centered, which means it can feel more alive and also more complex than visiting Yellowstone or Gettysburg. NPS rangers at these parks often deal with interpretive questions that are still politically contested — how to frame the labor movement at Pullman, how to interpret the moral weight of atomic weapons at Manhattan Project, how to present the civil rights movement's ongoing relevance at MLK Jr. NHP.
If you live in or near one of these parks (particularly Pullman, Sweet Auburn, or the Blackstone River Valley): The partnership-heavy model means NPS may own some buildings, hold preservation easements on others, and cooperate with local nonprofits and city agencies for still others — all within a neighborhood where regular life continues. Property owners within or adjacent to these park boundaries may be bound by easements that restrict exterior modifications to historically significant structures. The economic development story can cut both ways: federal park designation brings visitors and stabilizes historic building values, but it can also accelerate gentrification pressure in neighborhoods with existing affordability challenges.
If you're an educator, school group leader, or civic organization: These parks preserve history that is still unfinished — the civil rights movement, labor rights, nuclear ethics, Indigenous-land colonization. NPS has invested significantly in expanding the interpretive frameworks at these units to move beyond simple heroic narratives toward the full social complexity of the history. The MLK Jr. NHP now interprets both King's vision and the ongoing struggle in Sweet Auburn; Manhattan Project NHP presents both the scientific achievement and Japanese perspectives on atomic bombing. If you bring student groups, the interpretive programs at these parks are substantively different from what a textbook can provide.
If you work in urban historic preservation or economic development: These enabling statutes are models for how Congress can use federal park designation to anchor preservation in working neighborhoods without buying out all the existing residents and businesses. The Paterson Great Falls model — designating a park around an active waterfall that still generates commercial hydroelectric power — shows how far the historical-park form can flex. For a city like Paterson that has experienced decades of disinvestment, NPS partnership provides both institutional capacity and a reason for federal and state investment in surrounding infrastructure.
<!-- /pria:personalize -->State Variations
Implementation differs widely because these units sit in very different settings:
- Illinois (Pullman): Chicago city government is an active partner; Pullman District is also on the National Register; state historic preservation tax credits matter for rehabilitation of adjacent historic commercial and residential buildings
- Georgia (MLK Jr. NHP): NPS manages the Birth Home but the King Center (operated by the King family) is a nonprofit, not an NPS facility — one of the more complex interpretive partnerships in the NPS system; NPS and the King Center operate adjacent but separately, which affects visitor circulation and programming
- Tennessee, New Mexico, Washington (Manhattan Project NHP): DOE retains jurisdiction over active nuclear facilities; NPS interpretation is confined to historically and publicly accessible areas; the nuclear security context means this park has more restricted access than almost any other NPS unit
- New Jersey (Paterson Great Falls NHP): Paterson is one of NPS's most urban and economically distressed host communities; NPS has partnered extensively with city and state officials on visitor infrastructure, wayfinding, and waterfall overlook development as part of broader downtown revitalization
Recent Developments
The Trump administration's 2025 NPS workforce reductions affected these community and innovation parks particularly sharply. Unlike remote scenic parks, urban partnership-heavy parks depend on staffing to maintain the interpretive programs, community relationships, and partnership coordination that are central to their missions — there's no landscape to "just exist" without staff. MLK Jr. NHP, with its complex interpretive program and high urban visitation, and Manhattan Project NHP, with its multi-state coordination requirements, both faced staffing pressures that directly affected program quality.
Manhattan Project NHP continued expanding its public interpretation in 2024-2025. The Los Alamos site opened new interpretive exhibits on the physics of the bomb and the human experience of the scientists who built it; Oak Ridge expanded tours of the K-25 uranium enrichment building (one of the largest buildings by floor area ever constructed). The ongoing challenge at Manhattan Project NHP is that DOE's nuclear security requirements limit public access to the most significant historic structures — the interpretive mission and the security mission are in permanent tension.
The MLK Jr. NHP underwent major interpretive updates ahead of the 50th anniversary of King's assassination (April 4, 2018) and continues to evolve its programming in subsequent years. NPS expanded its presentation of King's advocacy on economic justice and Vietnam — aspects of his legacy that were historically underemphasized in NPS interpretation in favor of the civil rights landmarks. The tension between the King family's management of the King Center (which controls rights to King's speeches and image) and NPS's interpretive independence remains an ongoing feature of this unusual partnership structure.
Pullman NHP achieved full operational status in 2024 after years of development since its 2015 national monument designation and subsequent NHP authorization. The visitor center in the historic factory building opened, and NPS launched formal programming on the Pullman Strike of 1894, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (the first Black-led union to secure a major labor agreement), and the role of Pullman porters in the Great Migration. The labor history interpretation has been praised by historians as a model for how NPS can present contested social history honestly.