Muir Woods' 'History Under Construction': rewriting a sign without erasing it

For years a sign in Founder's Grove at Muir Woods told visitors how the forest was saved, with a timeline running from Yellowstone in 1872 to the Endangered Species Act in 1973. Nothing on it was wrong. But the rangers came to see that it left out so much that it was inaccurate by omission — and instead of taking it down, they added to it, under a new sign: "Alert! History Under Construction!"

Muir Woods rangers discuss different historical narratives with a student group. NPS / Jace Ritchey

The facts stay; the telling changes

Visitors asked by rangers what "history" means often describe something fixed, final and told from one point of view. But the way history is told reflects who is telling it. For most of its existence, from its founding in 1916 into the early 1960s, the Park Service employed few women and even fewer people of colour, and its early stories show a white, male perspective. As its workforce changed, so did the stories. Research into women's part in saving Muir Woods began in earnest in 2018, when a ranger asked herself whether anyone else had been involved.

The rangers' principle: the building blocks of history change little, but understanding of the past is always being rebuilt as research turns up more.

Three stories the old sign did not tell

Indigenous stewardship. Before Europeans arrived, some 20,000 Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo people, living at about 850 sites, tended the lands of today's Marin and southern Sonoma counties, using fire to care for the forest. The old timeline began thousands of years after that, and never said why they were no longer there.

The women. An elite women's club began the first campaign to save "Sequoia Canyon" in 1904, and Elizabeth Kent, who bought the land with her husband, went on to lead the congressional work of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

The founders' other legacies. William Kent gave Muir Woods to the nation and co-wrote the law that created the National Park Service — and, running for Congress, said "We must exclude Asiatics … I wish it were possible to ship them all away." In office he pushed laws that kept Asian immigrants out, barred them from owning land and blocked their citizenship. Several leading redwood conservationists, among them Madison Grant, Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt, had ties to the eugenics movement, which held that society should stop some groups — most often people of colour, disabled people and the poor — from having children. Eugenicists saw the redwood's resistance to pests and fire as a metaphor for a "superior race" making its last stand; an early draft of a Muir Woods sign asked whether the trees' height meant "a superior race?"

Ecology has since shown the opposite: redwoods thrive only inside a web of fungi and other organisms that sustain the whole forest.

The sign before and after: the original timeline is in white; everything in yellow was added. No original date was removed or changed. NPS / Jace Ritchey

From the timeline: what was there, and what was added

A method anyone can use

Laying a fuller timeline over an old one is a way to ask what is missing and why. The rangers offer the same questions to visitors, classrooms and communities: comparing the white and the yellow, what surprises you? Which histories where you live are incomplete, and what could you do about it?

The FrameWorks Institute's Reframing History toolkit, the American Historical Association's survey on history and public culture, and the Organization of American Historians' Imperiled Promise report go further.

Sources

Written from "History Under Construction," Muir Woods National Monument, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The article draws on the book Defending the Master Race for the eugenicists' view of the redwoods.