Find Your Park announced at Keweenaw National Historical Park

Date: April 2, 2015
Contact: Jo Holt, [phone]

Keweenaw National Historical Park joins parks, programs and partners across the country to encourage everyone to find their park and share their stories online at FindYourPark.com. Launched by the National Park Service and the National Park Foundation, Find Your Park is a public awareness and education campaign celebrating the milestone centennial anniversary of the National Park Service in 2016.

Find Your Park invites the public to see that a national park can be more than a place: it can be a feeling, a state of mind, or a sense of pride in American accomplishments, events, and movements. Beyond vast landscapes, the campaign highlights historical, urban, and cultural parks, as well as the National Park Service programs that protect, preserve and share nature, culture, and history in communities nationwide.

Keweenaw NHP and its partners will be holding their first Find Your Park event on April 9, 2015, when bells in Calumet and across the Copper Country will join those across the nation commemorating the 150^th anniversary of Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House. As the major supplier of copper to the Union army, Copper Country mines made a unique contribution to the war effort. Keweenaw NHP hopes that this commemoration invites everyone to reflect on our significant copper mining history, but also remember the continuing struggle for human rights here and around the globe. Listen for bells to ring for four minutes—one minute for each year of the war—at 3:15 pm on April 9^th. Later that night, plan to check out Quincy Mine's No. 2 shaft-rockhouse, which will be illuminated in recognition of Quincy's role as the preeminent copper supplier during the war.

Find Your Park is also the theme for this year's National Park Week, which begins on Junior Ranger Day on April 18 and runs until April 26. Keweenaw NHP will be holding the 13^th annual High School Local History Smackdown as a part of National Park Week, which connects area youth to local history and helps them find the national park in their own backyard! As Keweenaw NHP superintendent Mike Pflaum noted, "the Smackdown has been a great way to encourage students to see how exciting our nationally significant local history is, and to learn how varied and diverse the National Park Service is," noting that several Smackdown participants have gone on to work for the park after graduation.

For more information about Find Your Park, Civil War bells, or the Smackdown, please visit www.nps.gov/kewe or call Jo Holt at 651-293-8472. n