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Ranking the most popular memorial sites
“The purpose of Memorial Day is to honor America’s war dead,” says Joe Davis, the Veterans of Foreign Wars’ Director of Public Affairs, offering a blunt reminder of the intent of a holiday that originated in the U.S. after the Civil War as “Decoration Day,” an occasion for citizens to lay flowers at the graves of those killed in battle.
While that intent is at times drowned out by the din of summer-inaugurating celebrations, solemn ceremony tends to be the order of the day at monuments and memorials throughout the country that commemorate (and mourn) America’s wars and soldiers.
See our slideshow of America's 15 Most Visited Memorials.
Visitation peaks at certain public monuments on Memorial Day (at Arlington Cemetery’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, for example, an annual presidential wreath-laying ceremony draws large crowds), but public war memorials attract steady traffic throughout the year, and the better-known monuments draw millions annually.
We looked at the National Park Service’s data on annual visitation to its various park “units” to compile a list of the 15 most-visited “memorial” destinations. While the NPS war-related sites and monuments have numerous designations (some are dubbed National Monuments or Memorials, others are National Historic Places; still others are called National Military Parks), we chose the top war-related sites, in terms of average annual visitation (from 2003 to 2007), regardless of their official categorization.
As might be expected, Washington, D.C.’s iconic war statues, walls and plazas dominate the top of the list. Gavriel Rosenfeld, Associate Professor of History at Fairfield University, refers to the nation’s capital as the “nerve center of memorials.” In addition to Arlington Cemetery (which itself contains dozens of monuments and memorials within its boundaries), the Washington, D.C. area is home to the National World War II Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans and Korean War Veterans Memorials, among many others.
The architectural styles of this array of memorials comprise polar opposites within the space of a few miles. Rosenfeld says that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the National World War II Memorial represent distinctly different forms of commemoration. The former, a sunken, V-shaped black granite wall inscribed with the names of the war’s casualties, takes what he calls a “humble aesthetic form,” while the latter assumes a more “traditional, heroic style.”
See our slideshow of America's 15 Most Visited Memorials.
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