A visit to Valley Forge

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, February 22nd. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: Valley Forge. As in soldiers, scant supplies, and the winter of 1777.

Last week, the Valley Forge National Historical Park visitor's center in Pennsylvania reopened, just in time to celebrate George Washington’s birthday. WORLD Senior Correspondent Kim Henderson visited the park a few days after the ribbon cutting.

KIM HENDERSON, SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: Visiting Valley Forge is like returning to your high school history class, only this time it’s total immersion.

AUDIO: [SOLDIER MOVEMENT]

You can hear the sound of soldiers arriving. You can see rows of huts and even jump rain puddles at their doors to touch wooden pallets lining their walls.

But a close look at tree limbs above the hut at stop number 2 reveals a very plastic 21st century kite. And that represents the challenge. Keeping history alive while time moves on.

AUDIO: [NEWS CLIP]

The updates of the visitors center at Valley Forge were the first since its dedication during the nation’s bicentennial. An exhibit displays a photo of President Gerald Ford there on July 4, 1976, signing legislation establishing the 3,500-acre park.

Museum-like exhibits were the bulk of the update. They give the history of the Continental Army’s winter encampment at Valley Forge.

AUDIO: [MOM READING SIGN]

As a mom from Ohio reads aloud information to her daughter, another family checks out a hands-on option, recreating huts using toy logs.

AUDIO: [LOGS]

Soldiers constructed more than 1,200 of the real ones.

A display further in teaches about fortifications. It’s hands-on, too, with squiggly magnetic cutouts representing redoubts, a type of defensive barrier used at Valley Forge.

AUDIO: [ORDERS]

Then a life-size screen soldier takes visitors through commands in both English and French. Remember, the French came to our aid that winter.

But the French aren’t the only ones who get equal time in this museum. The new scenes and signage at Valley Forge reflect diversity. A lot of it.

AUDIO: VISITOR CENTER MOVIE

A full-sized George Washington still sits atop his white horse, but exhibits also highlight the contributions of native Americans, immigrants, and slaves.

AUDIO: [MOVIE]

Telling the broader story may reflect current social pressures. Or it could be related to something that happened within the Parks Service as early as 1998. A report that year involving Civil War battlefields led to the “Holding the Higher Ground” initiative, an effort to more fully chronicle the lives of minorities and women at national park sites.

But one push in the displays seems a bit contemporary, the section on revolutionary medicine. Valley Forge is hailed as one of the first locations for a state-mandated mass-immunization program in history. Small pox.

The push also showed up on one of the museum’s figures, a soldier who’s lifelike, right down to the ridges in his knuckles. But don’t ask to remove the COVID mask covering the lower half of his finely-designed 18th century face. The park official will laugh you away. They want it on. Humorous history.

MUSIC: [YANKEE DOODLE SONG]

But what happened at Valley Forge wasn’t funny. A dispirited army of 12,000 became a unified fighting force, even while suffering from hunger, severe cold, and diseases like influenza and typhoid. It’s that hard history that proves the draw and fills the visitors’ album with recent signatures from Alabama, Kansas, Florida, Montana, New York, Oklahoma—even Germany and South Africa.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Kim Henderson in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.

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