Landmarking Labor: Labor History and the National Historic Landmarks Program

Frances Perkins was by far one of the most important women of her generation. In 1932, her long and distinguished career as a social worker and New York State Industrial Commissioner took an important turn for American women, and for the country as a whole, when she was appointed U.S. Secretary of Labor, the first woman ever to be included in a president's cabinet.

The Potowmack Canal Historic District consists of the largest, longest and most intact remains of the Potowmack Canal, built between 1786 and 1802, and the ruins of the small associated town of Matildaville. The development of the Potowmack Canal required interstate cooperation and the canal planners saw that the new republic would require similar collaboration thus inspiring the unification of the colonies to become the United States of America.

The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Martinsburg shops are one of the few remaining examples of innovative nineteenth-century engineering and industrial architecture. Not only is the engineering and architecture important. The laborers who worked here played a major role in the first days of “The Great Railway Strike of 1877,” a pivotal episode in American labor history.

In 1966, "The Forty Acres," a parcel of land in Delano, California, became the headquarters for the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), the first permanent agricultural labor union in the United States.

Kake Cannery, containing over a dozen buildings constructed from 1912 to 1940, demonstrates trends and technology in the Pacific salmon canning industry.

Based in Alexandria, Virginia, Isaac Franklin and John Armfield were the largest traders of enslaved African Americans in the nation between 1828 and 1836. Franklin and Armfield orchestrated the trafficking of thousands of enslaved African Americans from their Alexandria office to the horrific labor conditions of the lower South in what has been called the Second Middle Passage.

The house holds the Penniman family's written records and artifact collections, which provide glimpses of the places and people that the family visited on their whaling voyages. Theirs is a true life whaling story representative of hundreds of other whaling captains and their families that traveled the globe to pursue whale fishery.

Union Square was a politically significant gathering place for labor activists into the twentieth century. Groups considered radical such as anarchists, socialists, and “Wobblies” (members of the Industrial Workers of the World) used Union Square as a meeting place leading up to World War I. In stride with its deeply political role in United States history, Union Square continues to be a site of protest, from annual Labor Day marches to recent Black Lives Matter activism.

New England native Colonel Henry Clay Hooker founded the first permanent cattle ranch in the Arizona territory in 1872 on the ruins of an earlier Spanish colonial estate. Hooker’s historic Sierra Bonita Ranch is located in spring-fed Sulphur Valley between the Galiuro and Pinaleño Mountains, which are part of the Coronado National Forest.

Operating a small drug store in Detroit in 1860, doctor and pharmacist Samuel P. Duffield partnered with Hervey Coke Parke and George S. Davis to establish a large pharmaceutical company.