Free
Washington, D.C., is full of monuments and memorials. They honor special people and events in U.S. history.
Monuments and More
The Washington Monument is 555 feet and 5-1/8 inches tall. It’s the tallest masonry (stone, brick, or concrete) structure on Earth. It’s also Washington’s only skyscraper. Work began on it in 1848 with private funding, but the money ran out in 1860. Author Mark Twain said the unfinished building looked like “a factory chimney with the top broken off.” It was finally completed in 1884. But people thought the steam elevator was too dangerous for women and children. They had to walk up the 896 steps. Today everyone must ride the elevator to the top. You can take a 45-minute tour walking down.
▲ Thomas Jefferson was the nation’s third president and the author of the Declaration of Independence. This memorial to him was completed in 1943, the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth. When plans were announced to build the memorial on the Tidal Basin, some people chained themselves to the Japanese cherry trees. They were afraid the construction would kill the trees, but only a few were lost.
▲ Arlington National Cemetery is across the Potomac River from D.C. More than 400,000 veterans and their dependents are buried there. The Tomb of the Unknowns holds the bodies of four unidentified soldiers. There’s one each from World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. A soldier stands guard at the tomb around the clock.
◀ The Korean War Veterans Memorial has statues of 19 ghostly gray soldiers in ponchos crossing a field. There’s also a black granite wall with a mural of their support groups, such as nurses.
◀ The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a V-shaped wall of polished black granite. It’s inscribed with the names of the nearly 60,000 U.S. military personnel who died or were declared missing in action in Southeast Asia between 1959 and 1975. Some visitors leave flowers, war medals, notes, and pictures near specific names. There was a national contest to design the memorial. The winner was Maya Ying Lin, who was then a 21-year-old art student. Although her art professor only gave her a B– for the design, it’s one of the city’s most successful monuments. More people go there than to any other memorial.
▲ During World War II, a group of marines struggled heroically to raise the U.S. flag on top of Mt. Suribachi on the Pacific island of Iwo Jima. A photographer took their photo. Later, this scene was turned into the biggest sculpture ever cast in bronze. It stands in Arlington National Cemetery, where it serves as the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial.
Think Piece!
What if you could design a monument to honor some person or event in U.S. history? Who or what would you choose? What would the monument look like? Where in Washington, D.C., would you put it?
Loading the player...
