Central Library

Washington, DC

Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955) was born to formerly enslaved parents in Mayesville, South Carolina, and rose to become one of America's most consequential educators and civil-rights leaders. With little more than resolve, she founded a school for Black girls in Daytona Beach, Florida, that grew into Bethune-Cookman University, organized the National Council of Negro Women, and advised President Franklin Roosevelt as part of the informal 'Black Cabinet.' Sculpted by Robert Berks and unveiled in Lincoln Park on July 10, 1974, the bronze shows Bethune passing a scroll of her legacy to two children, echoing the inscription's charge, 'Let her works praise her.'

Fountain Hill, PA

In a house on this Fountain Hill hillside in 1898, the writer Stephen Vincent Benét was born into a literary family that would produce several published authors. He grew up steeped in books and history, and by the 1920s and '30s had become one of America's most celebrated poets and storytellers. His verse epic of the Civil War, "John Brown's Body," won wide acclaim for the way it wove ordinary soldiers, statesmen, and everyday Americans into a sweeping national portrait. He died in 1943, still in his prime, having spent his final years urging his countrymen to hold fast to their founding ideals.

Kent County, MD

This is a crownstone — one of the ornate boundary markers set along the Mason-Dixon Line, the border that surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon painstakingly ran between 1763 and 1767 to settle a bitter, decades-long dispute between two proprietary families. The heraldic crests carved into its faces name those families: the Penns of Pennsylvania looking east, the Calverts of Maryland looking west. Unlike the plainer mileposts, crownstones like this one were imported from England and placed every five miles, each a small monument to a border drawn with astronomical precision through colonial wilderness.

Matawan, NJ

This bell once called children to lessons at Matawan's first public graded school — a 'graded' school being one that sorted pupils into age-based grades rather than teaching all ages in a single room, a reform that swept American education in the decades after the Civil War. As towns like Matawan grew, the old one-room schoolhouse gave way to organized, tax-supported public schools with separate classrooms and a set curriculum. Preserved and mounted for display, the bell is a tangible relic of that shift toward the modern public school system.