PHILADELPHIA — More than 400 photos of exhibits at Independence National Historical Park have been digitally archived, ensuring a form of preservation amid the Trump administration’s attempts to whitewash history at national parks, including in Philadelphia.

The photos were crowdsourced over months from Independence Park visitors as part of the “Save Our Signs” initiative, which has created a now-publicly accessible digital archive of national park exhibits across the country in response to Trump’s executive order to remove content that “inappropriately disparage[s] Americans past or living.”

In the Independence Park archive, users can find many photos of various exhibits within the President’s House Site, which has been a reported target of the Trump administration’s desire to sanitize history. The site details the horrors of slavery and memorializes the nine people George Washington enslaved there during the founding of the United States.

Independence Park received the second most photo submissions, 407, in the entire project, behind Ellis Island, which was at one time the epicenter for immigration into the U.S.

“I think people can use this to be able to continue to make the case to support the continuation of not just the signs, but also the site of the President’s House, and being able to bolster that community that cares,” said Lynda Kellam, a Philadelphia-based data librarian and a founding member of Save Our Signs.

Kellam’s Data Rescue Project, which aims to preserve at-risk federal public data, and library and history experts from Minnesota joined forces this summer to establish Save Our Signs. As of Wednesday, the group had amassed 10,917 user-submitted photos nationwide.

Though as of Wednesday the Trump administration has made no physical moves to alter the President’s House, the threats to the site and other exhibits about slavery at Independence Park have been a lightning rod for local activism.

Leading that activism is the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition (ATAC), a Black-led advocacy group that helped shape the President’s House Site in the early 2000s. ATAC is part of the newly formed President’s House/Slavery Memorial Alliance, which has held rallies, town halls, and meetings to strategize efforts to protect the President’s House.

Michael Coard, an attorney and leader of ATAC, said Wednesday that he is “ecstatic” about Save Our Signs’ work and hopes the two groups can collaborate in the near future.

He said the mounting pressure from ATAC, the alliance, Save Our Signs, and other groups is the reason that the Sept. 17 deadline for changes to be made at national park exhibits “came and went” without alterations to the President’s House.

“If we all come together, there’ll never be a Sept. 17 deadline or any other deadline, because the people have risen up, and that’s the only thing that can stop what’s been planned by the Trump administration,” Coard said.

Other efforts include a letter, signed by 45 local historical groups, to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and a commitment by Visit Philadelphia, the city’s top tourism agency, that it will relocate any removed exhibits from the President’s House Site. City Council has also condemned potential changes to the site.

“It’s really nice for me, from a personal perspective, to be able to kind of see this larger project influence or be able to bolster the efforts that are happening in my own community,” Kellam said.

And the preservation is not stopping there. Save Our Signs will continue collecting images; any submitted after Sept. 24 will be released at another time, and the group is mulling over other possible ways to present the data, including through a mapping project or providing the data for local projects.

As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary next year, U.S. history — both the triumphs and the tragedies — will be on full display. The turmoil between advocates and the Trump administration could represent a larger battle about who gets to tell the true story of America’s founding ahead of next year’s commemorations.

The battle is playing out in various areas of the country, including at the Smithsonian Institution — which was also targeted by Trump’s executive order — where Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian, a volunteer group, has collected more than 31,500 photos and videos of exhibits since Aug. 21. Citizen Historians was “inspired” by Save Our Signs and is considered a sister project, the group said.

Efforts to protect historical exhibits from the Trump administration are becoming more prominent, but the work is still “mind-blowing,” Kellam said.

“It’s an unfortunate thing that we feel like we need to save our information, our government information, and our access to information from our own government,” Kellam said.

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