National Capital Parks-Central

The Vietnam Memorial is composed of a long, black-granite, V-shaped wall with the names of 58, 209 Americans missing or killed in the Vietnam war. There is also a life-size bronze statue of three servicemen.Congress approved the idea for the Memorial in 1980. It was designed by Maya Lin, a 21-year old Yale Architecture student, who won the national design competition.Names are listed in chronological order starting with the first casualty date. There is a diamond next to the name of each confirmed death and a plus sign for those unaccounted for, unconfirmed or missing.Nearby, is the Vietnam Women's Memorial with a 2000-pound bronze sculpture depicting three servicewomen helping a wounded soldier.

The Thomas Jefferson memorial contains a 19-foot statue of the third president along with excerpts of the Declaration of Independence and other samples of his writings. The monument is a circular dome supported by 54 Ionic columns. The design is based on the Roman Pantheon. The site has a good view of the Washington Monument across a reflective lake.

The George Mason Memorial commemorates the contributions of an important Founding Father. George Mason was the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights. Masons' greatest act was withholding his signature from the United States Constitution because it did not abolish the slave trade and lacked necessary protection for the individual from the Federal Government.

The Sewall-Belmont House is one of the oldest houses on Capitol Hill. As the home of the National Woman's Party, it contains exhibits devoted to the early days of the women's movement. Period furniture as well as portraits and busts of important suffrage advocates and leaders like Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Paul adorn Sewall-Belmont House.

Located along the famous Cherry Tree Walk on the Tidal Basin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial traces twelve years of American History through a sequence of four outdoor rooms-each one devoted to one of FDR's terms of office. He is a respected leader that guided the country through the Great Depression and World War II.

The Old Post Office, built between 1892 and 1899, is one of the last remaining pieces of Richardsonian Romanesque Architecture. The Bells of U.S. Congress, a present from England on the Nation's Bicentennial, are housed here.

The Korean War Veterans Memorial contains 19 steel sculptures of soldiers marching uphill and a 164 foot long wall with photographs of the support crews involved in the conflict.