Maryland's First State Tree Nursery

Calvert County, MD

In 1925, biologist Reginald V. Truitt set out to study the fish, oysters, and crabs of the Chesapeake Bay, and the laboratory he founded on Maryland's western shore became one of the earliest marine research stations on the East Coast. By 1931 the state's Conservation Department had taken up its support, joined by a remarkable consortium of universities and colleges — Johns Hopkins, Goucher, St. John's, and others — pooling scholars to turn the great estuary into a living classroom. From this modest waterside outpost grew a tradition of Bay science that would inform how a nation cares for its coastal waters.

Washington, DC

This plaque marks the Brookland home of Sterling Allen Brown (1901–1989), the poet, critic, and folklorist who spent decades as a professor at Howard University shaping generations of Black writers and scholars. Drawing on the blues, spirituals, and the speech of everyday African American life, Brown insisted that this vernacular tradition belonged at the center of American literature. The quoted lines come from his celebrated poem 'Strong Men,' a defiant anthem of endurance in the face of oppression.

Silver Spring, MD

This plaque marks the spot where one of the original boundary stones of the District of Columbia was set in 1791–1792. The stones were placed at intervals to mark out the ten-mile-square federal district for the new national capital. Together they form some of the earliest federal monuments in the country.

Washington, DC · est. 1947

On June 3, 1880, Alexander Graham Bell transmitted speech through the air on a beam of light—not a wire—using his newly invented 'photophone,' sending a wireless voice message from the top of this building to a receiver blocks away. Bell considered the photophone among his most important inventions, though the world was not yet ready to use light for communication. The plaque was placed in 1947 to mark the centennial of his birth.