by Sarah Collier, Executive Director, National Road Heritage Corridor
When I was a junior in high school, I dropped out of AP U.S. History.
This is still a surprising sentence for me to write. I was a good student, a member of the National Honor Society, and student council president. Humanities were supposed to be my strength, and many of my friends were taking the class. There was no obvious reason for me to leave it.
But I did.
It wasn’t that I disliked history. In fact, I was fortunate enough to have parents who spent large portions of my childhood taking me to significant places throughout our region. They let me explore how musket balls were made at the Shot Tower, what plantation life looked like at the Hampton Mansion, and why John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry mattered. History, as I experienced it then, was tactile and human and full of questions.
I loved going to historic sites. I loved eating in old hotels. I loved poking around old buildings and viewing artifacts from the past. My mother’s best friend lived in Gettysburg and showed me a place where she said freedom seekers once hid from slave catchers, a small nook above a massive walk in fireplace. I found all of this fascinating.
What I struggled with was history presented as memorization without meaning. In this class, a significant portion of our grade rested on marble composition notebooks filled week after week with names, definitions, and dates copied faithfully from a massive textbook. I couldn’t connect to that approach. I made it through two weeks of haphazardly trying to complete my notebook and then I dropped the class.
Twenty five years later, I serve as Executive Director of the National Road Heritage Corridor, an organization grounded in the fundamentals of American history. That irony isn’t lost on me.
What I’ve come to understand is that I didn’t reject history. I rejected a version of it that left no room for curiosity, context, or connection. What I found instead, and what we have shaped NRHC around, is a different way of engaging with the past. One that asks not just what happened, but why it mattered, how it shaped the places we inhabit, and what it still asks of us today.
I share this because it gets to the heart of who we are as a Heritage Area.
If you are academically inclined, if you love archives, footnotes, and deep historical analysis, NRHC is here for you. We value rigorous scholarship and work closely with historians, preservationists, and researchers who help ensure the stories we tell are accurate and responsibly told.
But we are also here for the people who don’t think of themselves as history people.
We are here for those who are simply curious about the world around them. Curious about why a town looks the way it does. Curious about how people moved across this landscape. Curious about who came before them, and what traces of those lives still remain.
As we enter America’s 250th anniversary, I hope we can celebrate curiosity as a starting point, not expertise as a prerequisite. Our heritage does not belong only to those with degrees or credentials. It belongs to everyone who lives in, moves through, and cares about this place. Exploration is for everyone.
If you find meaning in understanding where we’ve been and how we arrived here, we hope the National Road Heritage Corridor is offering something that resonates with you. Something that helps you see this landscape, and your relationship to it, a little more clearly.
Curiosity is enough.
