Where's Ours? Congress Creates Seven (7) New National Parks, Expands Nine (9), Studies Eight (8): National Parks Conservation Association

Q: What new national park sites will this bill create?

A: The bill will create seven new national park sites and it will expand nine existing sites.

New national park units

Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park (Rhode Island and Massachusetts)
Coltsville National Historical Park (Connecticut)
Harriet Tubman National Historical Park (New York)
Manhattan Project National Historical Park (New Mexico, Tennessee, and Washington)
Valles Caldera National Preserve (New Mexico)
Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument (Nevada)
National World War I Memorial (Washington, D.C.)


Park expansions

Apostle Islands National Lakeshore (Wisconsin)
First State National Historical Park (Delaware)
Gettysburg National Military Park (Pennsylvania)
Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park (Maryland, separate from the new site in New York)
Hinchliffe Stadium, Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park (New Jersey)
Oregon Caves National Monument and Preserve (Oregon)
San Antonio Missions National Historical Park (Texas)
Vicksburg National Military Park (Mississippi)
Lower East Side Tenement Museum National Historic Site (New York)


In addition, Congress authorized eight formal resource studies to determine whether other sites would be appropriate for future inclusion in the National Park System. These eight study areas are:

The Lower Mississippi Delta area of Louisiana, a region of the South with historic and strategically placed Civil War forts and a unique cultural history
Sites honoring the legacy of the Buffalo Soldiers; a trail tracing the route of the 9th U.S. Cavalry’s trek from the Presidio to Sequoia Kings Canyon is one possible park site
Mill Springs Battlefield, the site of a January 1862 Civil War battle in Kentucky
Rota, one of the 15 islands that make up the Commonwealth of Lower Mariana in the western Pacific Ocean
Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument, a memorial in Brooklyn, New York, to the more than 11,500 prisoners of war who died as captives in British ships during the Revolutionary War
Sites related to the Flushing Remonstrance in Queens, New York, where Quakers in 1657 protested a ban on being able to worship, inspiring the founding American principle of freedom of religion in the Bill of Rights
West Hunter Street Baptist Church, a site in Atlanta, Georgia, that served as a headquarters for many in the Civil Rights movement during the 1960s
New Philadelphia, Illinois, the first town in the United States planned and registered by an African American