Today we visited Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park and Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. Both of these sites are reasonably close to Kansas City, MO where we decided to remain for a couple of nights.
Our first stop was Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Park in Topeka, KS. In 1954 the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of the Browns. The Court ruled that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” and therefore laws that impose them violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendmentof the U.S. Constitution. From Wikipedia.
There were actually five separate cases heard by the Supreme Court regarding the subject of segregation in public schools. In fact, in 2022 the National Historic Site designation was changed to National Historic Park designation in order to include six other schools in South Carolina, Delaware, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Including these other sites gives a much broader perspective of the events leading up to the historic Supreme Court decision, as each one was involved in one of the five cases heard.
The site was very moving. Dan and I have visited 36 NPS sites so far and he said that this was the first time he’s gotten goosebumps exploring the exhibits. We talked for a long time with one of the park rangers (we visited the day after Christmas during a blizzard, lol) and he mentioned that he was very familiar with the inside of the Westboro Baptist Church because of his family upbringing. As a side note, this church came from Topeka to protest in front of the church I was active in at the time, St. Paul Reformation Lutheran Church, because of their hatred of all things associated with LGBT people. He said that he has worked very hard to raise his kids in a different environment. We got the feeling he really enjoyed his job.
Our second stop today was the Tallgrass Prarie National Preserve in Strong City, KS. It’s still the day after Christmas and we’re still in the midst of a blizzard so again there were only a couple people, other than us, there.
While this picture doesn’t look like a blizzard, you can see the snow on Dan’s coat and the edge of the sign. Lucky for us it was 34 degrees so nothing really stuck to the ground.
This park is privately owned by the Nature Conservancy and co-managed with the National Park Service. The entire site is almost 11,000 acres of natural prairie grass ecosystem and is one of the few remaining examples in the country. There was once some 400,000 square miles of prairie grass but now less than 5% of that remains.
Because we visited in December the vast fields were dormant and much of it had been burned off to encourage the new growth next year. The tallgrass prairies in North America have a unique history that began with the important role they played to the Native American tribes in the area. As the area started to be developed for farming, the original ranch on this site began in the late 1800’s. The interest in the area (tallgrass prairie in particular) being somehow preserved as a historical example came almost 100 years later, around 1960.
The 40 plus miles of hiking trails are truly the most significant piece of the park, but much of the original ranch built in the 1800’s has also been preserved, showing some of what a prairie grass farming operation looked like (if you were incredibly wealthy). Sadly, we were only able to see the buildings from the outside, except for the barn, because the staffing was very light.
There was a nice example of some of the 30 plus miles of limestone fence put up by the original owner when free range grazing went away with only one horse quietly eating grass up by the barn. He was not nearly as interested in the two whippets peaking over the top of his fence at him as the two whippets were of this huge doggie.
This is an important example of what much of the Midwest looked like 150 to 200 years ago. An ecosystem that is all but gone now. That said, I recommend you visit during the spring, summer, or fall in order to take in some of the hikes.
Let us know what some of your favorite places have been in the National Park System so we can plan our next trip!
