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The sound of the party filters across the mansion’s lawn long before you see it: Dozens of guests spill out onto the front porch of the stately Fendall Hall in Eufaula, Alabama.

It’s an engagement party, and past the people drinking white wine in the main hall is one of the home’s historians, Susan Campbell.

She swings open the door to the expansive backyard.

“They had, like, 5 acres or so,” Campbell says of the former owners, the Young-Dent family. They built the house in the late 1850s.

But you might already know this, because planted in the front yard of this historical home is a large, black-and-gold, square metal historical marker with the seal of the Alabama Historical Commission — and it says so.

Edward Brown Young was a “banker, merchant and entrepreneur,” it says. He “organized the company which built the first bridge” in Eufaula, and his daughter married a Confederate captain in the “War Between the States.”

What the marker doesn’t mention, however, is that Young was a cotton broker, one of the most powerful men in the slave trade. Nor does it mention that he owned nine slaves, according to the federal 1860 census.

And while the sign claims the company he organized built the bridge, that bridge, spanning the Chattahoochee River, was actually designed, managed and built by a slave named Horace King, a renowned and gifted engineer, along with a large group of enslaved men.

Campbell says she’d like to see more of this information included.

“But that’s because I’m a Northerner, not a Southerner,” she says. She moved to the South 20 years ago from Michigan. She says most people she knows here wouldn’t agree with her.

“I mean, they know,” she says, glancing over at the revelers on the porch. “They know it. But [they] don’t necessarily want to be reminded.”

That’s the difficult thing about the truth. It’s just not as fun to throw parties in places where terrible things happened.

How the U.S. tells its own story is a debate raging in schools, statehouses and public squares nationwide. It has led to social movements and angry protests. But for more than a century, historical markers have largely escaped that kind of scrutiny.

With more than 180,000 of them scattered across the U.S., it’s easy to see why:

Even governments don’t really know what they all say. Many state officials told NPR that they have no idea what signs are in their state, what stories they tell or who owns them.

And while markers often look official, the reality is that anyone can put up a marker — more than 35,000 different groups, societies, organizations, towns, governments and individuals have. It costs a few thousand dollars to order one.

Over the past year, NPR analyzed a database crowdsourced by thousands of hobbyists, looking to uncover the patterns, errors and problems with the country’s markers. The effort revealed a fractured and often confused telling of the American story, where offensive lies live with impunity, history is distorted and errors are sometimes as funny as they are strange.

Three separate states, for example, have markers that claim to be the place where anesthesia was discovered. Two states, Kentucky and Missouri, both claim to be the home of Daniel Boone’s bones. Michigan and Alabama both claim to be the home of the first railroad west of the Allegheny Mountains, while Maryland and New Jersey both claim to have sent the first telegram.

Texas, on the other hand, claims to be the home of the first successful airplane flight — completed by a man who was neither of the Wright brothers.

Meanwhile, dead animals are rampant. Florida marks a dead alligator named Old Joe; California marks a dead horse — also named Old Joe. Arizona put up a marker for a donkey that drank beer. California thought it had a dead mastodon until a marker explained it was actually a dead circus elephant.

Somewhat dead humans are also popular. There are markers memorializing 14 ghosts, two witches, one vampire, a wizard and a couple who, a New Hampshire marker says, may have been abducted by aliens.

But the deeds of men are far more prevalent, even if questionable. Nevada marks a man who killed 11 people in the 1850s, even though it notes he had “few, if any redeeming traits.” Arizona, on the other hand, marks the grave of a man the local town wrongly hanged for stealing a horse in 1882. It says, “He was right. We was wrong. … Now he’s gone.”

There are markers to “world famous” items that few could likely pinpoint: soda water, cantaloupes, roofing slate, mustard, frozen custard, French-style cheese, beef jerky, a Santa Claus school, bourbon ball candy and dozens of others.

These are not to be outdone by the “world’s best” cheddar cheese, hobby garden or seed rice, or even the “world’s greatest” waterfall, harbor, gold mine, battleship, oil field, rodeo clown, roller coaster or chicken, among many others.

While some markers date back centuries, they proliferated in the 20th century, meant to capture the attention of traveling Americans who had hit the road for the first time in their new cars. The markers brought business and tourism to out-of-the-way towns. Today the roadsides and public squares of America are replete with markers that fulfill their most basic purpose, offering a simple, often sterile recounting of an interesting moment in place and time.

But over the past century, many markers have also become symbols of the country’s dark and complicated past, in some cases erected not to commemorate history but to manipulate how it is told, NPR found.

From the Atlantic through the Plains, more than 270 markers describe Native Americans as “savage,” “hostile” or “semi-civilized,” or they use racial slurs.

In the West and Southwest, markers herald the work of missionaries and praise rangers without mentioning the violence and cultural destruction they often inflicted.

Across the South, markers honor notable men and notable houses without mentioning the forced, free labor that made both the homes and the men’s wealth possible. NPR found that nearly 70% of markers that mention plantations do not mention slavery.

A fractured version of history

Particularly distorted is the Civil War, one of the single most marked topics nationwide. NPR’s analysis revealed more than 500 markers that describe the Confederacy in glowing terms, vilify the Union, falsify the reasons for the war or recast Confederate soldiers as the war’s true heroes.

At least 65 markers appear to promote a racist philosophy called the Lost Cause, which claims, among other things, that Black people enjoyed being enslaved.

Many of those Confederate markers weren’t written in error, NPR found. They were part of a plan.

One of them is in Tuskegee, Ala., a city that Council Member Johnny Ford describes as the “citadel of the Civil Rights Movement.”

Standing in the town square, he ticks off aspects of the city’s famous history: home of the Tuskegee Airmen, Tuskegee University, Booker T. Washington’s National Business League. It was also the birthplace of Rosa Parks.

Close to 90% of its residents are Black, he points out.

But in the middle of the square is a stone marker depicting two Confederate flags that says: “Honor the brave. With God as our vindicator. Erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy to the Confederate soldiers of Macon County.”

By Ford’s reading, that marker “reflects the fight to preserve slavery,” he says. “That is not a positive sign for us here in our community.”

Ford and other citizens of Tuskegee have tried for decades to remove the marker, which, like many Confederate stone markers, also has a Confederate soldier on top.

But they can’t. Because like thousands of markers nationwide, it was put up by a private group — in this case, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization made up almost entirely of white women.

“They said they built it in honor of the Confederate dead, which we respect,” Ford said. “Honor their dead, but not in a public place. Put it in some museum.”

But museum exhibits were not what the United Daughters of the Confederacy was after. While the group’s monument-building efforts are well known, NPR’s analysis found that the United Daughters also helped erect more than 600 historical markers, far surpassing the efforts of any other Civil War heritage group.

These markers congratulate men for fighting for “the cause,” “a sacred cause,” “their righteous cause” and “a lost cause” and for their “patriotic devotion,” “heroism unsurpassed” and “faultless valor” as they fought to break the country apart to keep men, women and children enslaved and preserve what the markers describe as their “glorious heritage.”

A “fairer flag was never furled,” declares one monument in Montgomery, Ala., not of the American flag, but the Confederate flag. In Sherman, Texas, a marker that the United Daughters of the Confederacy rededicated in 1996 claims Confederate soldiers’ actions will “teach future generations … Southern chivalry.”

The group put up at least three markers for and memorials to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. It put up a marker outside Concord, N.C., to the KKK itself, though that one has been removed.

Lately, Ford and the United Daughters have been battling in court. But Ford says it’s hard to know whom he’s fighting.

“There are no daughters that live here,” Ford said. “I think they’re mostly dead. They don’t pay any taxes here. Yet they want to dominate our square.”

Jay Hinton, a lawyer an hour away in Montgomery who represents the group in court, told NPR in an interview that the women just want to honor dead Confederate soldiers. He acknowledged that few, if any, United Daughters live in the area.

Tax records show that the group, based in Richmond, Va., has $11 million in assets, with an annual revenue of $1 million to $2 million.

Asked why the United Daughters want to keep a marker in a place they don’t live, in a town that doesn’t want it, for soldiers who died 160 years ago, Hinton said it’s the women’s choice to make. While the 1906 town deed filed in the courthouse across the street gave the land for the marker to the United Daughters to keep as a “park for white people,” Hinton says the group has always let everyone use the park.

“We’re pretty comfortable, and it makes us feel like good citizens to say that we didn’t discriminate, and therefore we shouldn’t be made to [remove the marker],” he said. “We think we get to keep the dirt because we’ve been doing what we ought to be doing from a constitutional perspective.”

Nationwide, markers from Civil War heritage groups like the United Daughters outnumber comparable Union groups’ markers by more than 2-to-1, NPR found. Confederate hospitals and Confederate cemeteries follow a similar pattern.

In all, markers about Confederates or the Confederacy are prolific, with more than 12,000 mentions. But the words “slave” and “slavery” show up only about half as many times.

When they do, many tell a racist myth about “faithful” slaves or otherwise diminish the reality of slavery. Others markers use racist language or support white supremacy.

As groups like the United Daughters disappeared from Tuskegee and other areas, historical markers gave those organizations and their message lasting and, in many cases, national visibility. The United Daughters put up markers as far away as Arizona, New Mexico and Washington, which weren’t even states at the time of the war.

Officials with the United Daughters did not respond to NPR’s requests for comment. But in a statement on its website, the organization says that its markers “simply represent a memorial to our forefathers who fought bravely” and that its members have “stayed quietly in the background, never engaging in public controversy.”

That’s not the history NPR found.

In November 1914, the United Daughters gathered for the group’s annual convention at the swanky DeSoto hotel in Savannah, Ga., to hear the keynote speaker, the group’s national historian, Mildred Lewis Rutherford.

“Slavery was no disgrace,” Rutherford told the women, according to records from the convention. “The Negro race should give thanks daily. … [Slaves] were the happiest set of people on the face of the globe. …

“In all the history of the world, no peasantry was ever better cared for, more contented or happier,” she said.

As she read these words, there hadn’t been a slaveholder in the U.S. for half a century. But Rutherford’s speech drove toward her final point: Slaveholders needed to be defended.

“These wrongs must be righted and the Southern slaveholder defended as soon as possible,” she said.

Records in state archives show the group began requiring chapters to form “memorial marker committees” and focus their efforts on fundraising.

And they haven’t stopped. While many groups have begun taking down Confederate symbols, the United Daughters of the Confederacy has helped put up 47 more markers over the last two decades.

“Markers are a reflection of the people who erect them”

So it was no surprise that when Bryan Stevenson arrived in Montgomery in the 1980s, long before he gained national acclaim for his work as executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, and went looking for markers about slavery, he couldn’t find one.

He says he counted 59 markers and monuments to the Confederacy back then as he drove around town. “Almost a preoccupation with mid-19th-century history,” he recalls. “But you could not find the word ‘slave,’ ‘slavery’ or ‘enslavement’ anywhere in the city.”

In 2013, Stevenson thought that this should change. He called up the Alabama Historical Association. He says the group sounded supportive.

“They said, ‘Oh, if it’s truthful, just give us the information and we’ll put it up,”’ Stevenson recalls. “We went to them and gave them a 60-page memo documenting the history we had investigated. And we got an email back that said, ‘Yeah, your information is all true and correct, but we can’t put up markers about slavery. That would be too controversial.'”

In that moment, Stevenson says, he understood what the United Daughters and other groups had figured out a century earlier: If you want to own the narrative, write it yourself.

Working with communities, Stevenson and his organization have now privately funded and erected more than a hundred markers telling the stories of lynchings in America.

Many communities have embraced the markers. A few markers have faced hostility. Two were stolen after they went up.

They’re just a small dent in the vast landscape of Confederate markers, but Stevenson says he’s not looking for even numbers.

“If we are effective at telling the truth about our history,” he says, “we will change our relationship to honoring things that are not honorable. We will.”

The association that once turned Stevenson down now has new leadership. Scotty Kirkland took over as chairman of the association’s Historical Marker Committee in 2015, and he agrees with Stevenson.

“Markers are a reflection of the people who erect them,” Kirkland says. “The first markers put out by the association, it looks like they were basically done by fiat. There’s no real racial diversity in these stories. There are no women marked in these early markers.”

Kirkland says the group is now funding a History Revealed initiative for new stories. The association has quietly removed the Confederate flag from several markers over the past couple of years.

But changing the narrative can be hard, especially when old markers are rarely rewritten or removed.

Many state officials told NPR that, outside the publicly sourced database or markers they helped sponsor, they have no way to know the entirety of the markers in their states.

Only a few states, including Alabama, Pennsylvania and Minnesota, have undertaken efforts to review existing markers. In Minnesota, officials drove out to 206 markers that the state historical society either paid for or helped put up. Officials told NPR they discovered every single one of them had a problem — from grammar issues to offensive language.

Meanwhile, three states — Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee — recently passed laws prohibiting the removal of markers on public land, making little allowance for how old, wrong, misguided, confusing or offensive they might be.

In the absence of being able to take markers down, many heritage organizations find it easier to just add new ones. In Alabama, another group, the Alabama Historical Commission — whose director controversially left in 2004, saying pro-Confederate attitudes pushed him out — now says it too is ready to move on from Confederate stories.

On a recent day, historian Theo M. Moore, who until recently was the commission’s African American heritage coordinator, stood in front of one of the group’s newest efforts. It’s a marker to Claudette Colvin, a young Black woman who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus before Rosa Parks.

Moore says it’s “a reminder that this was a place of importance.”

“We’ve been taught the same history, especially in the South,” he says. “This is how all these stereotypes come about. What is presented all the time is negativity.”

As if on cue, a neighbor, Arthur Sanders, walks across the street to tell Moore how much he likes the new marker.

“Our neighborhood disappeared, man, but that,” he says, pointing to the marker, “that makes a difference because it’s the start of trying to get our neighborhood back.”

Moore smiles. As he gets back in his car, Moore says he knows it’s just a metal sign. Most people don’t even read them. But as he pulls away, he says Sanders is right: how you tell history shapes how you see the future.

And lately, he says, something else has been bothering him.

“We have all these cities named after Creek Native Americans: Wetumpka, Tuskegee, Notasulga, Loachapoka, Opelika, Tuscaloosa. … That’s all Native American, right?” he says, pausing. “Where’s, you know, where’s their markers?”

The Native American story

Across the country, more than 15,000 markers mention Native Americans. But the history written on them often isn’t theirs.

If there are two sides on the American frontier, NPR found the nation’s historical markers come down solidly on the side of white settlers. At least 200 markers tell an eerily similar American tale: Native Americans attacked innocent white settlers for no reason.

Darla Gebhard knows this story well.

A research librarian at the Brown County Historical Society in New Ulm, Minn., she walked through a 170-year-old cemetery there, past rows of gravestones.

“I’ll show you what was going through their mind if we come over here,” she says. “You’ll see the gravity of it.”

She stops in front of dozens of graves. Their names have faded with time: John Schneider, Julius Fenske, Ernst Dietrich and many more. But the words carved underneath are clear:

“Killed by Indians, killed by Indians, killed by Indians,” Gebhard says, reading each one. “You have entire families that lost their lives. This is what the reality was for them in 1862.”

Gebhard is right — this was the reality for many people who lived on the Minnesota plains in the 1800s. It wasn’t, however, the reality for all the people who lived here.

John Robertson, a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate tribe and a descendant of Minnesota Dakotas, stood at the edge of an expansive field in southern Minnesota known as Cansa’yapi, homeland of the Lower Sioux Indian Community in an area the federal government calls the Lower Sioux Agency.

“We’re looking out over what would have been in 1862 the tall grass prairie,” he says. “Even today you don’t see any trees, and that’s the way it would have been for 250 miles.”

Three years ago, Minnesota agreed to return 114 acres of the prairie back to the tribe, acknowledging the land had never belonged to the state in the first place.

When tribal members took over the property, they also took over management of 22 state historical signs. As Robertson heads out onto a nearby path, he sums up what many of them said.

“You know, this poor settler family was massacred, and they had no defenses — the women were violated and the children were taken,” he says. “I mean, that’s the kind of language that are on these markers.”

Robertson, who is site manager for the property, says tribal members spent a long time considering each one. And then they made a decision: to take them all down.

On a recent day, Robertson heads out on the trails to see how things are going, along with Amber Annis, who is Cheyenne River Lakota and an associate vice president with the Minnesota Historical Society. They’re helping the tribe replace the signs. As a crew bangs new signs into the ground, they toss the old ones into a heap on the grass.

Robertson says it wasn’t just the signs that called tribal members savages or described violent acts that troubled him. It was all the signs they weren’t even on — as if the history of this place hadn’t happened at all.

Annis stops in front of a stone building along the path and reads the old sign. “The [Stone Warehouse] is 43 by 23 feet, 20 feet in height, with a good substantial cellar 8 feet deep,” she says. “The cellar walls are 3 feet. The first-story walls [are] 2 feet, and the second-story walls are 18 inches thick.”

Robertson shakes his head. The sign, including all the dimensions, isn’t wrong, he says. It’s oblivious.

The warehouse was the spark that started the U.S.-Dakota wars. It’s why all those settlers in the cemetery died and an untold number of Dakotas with them.

“This was the flashpoint of the actual war beginning here and the establishment of the conquered status of the Dakota nation,” Robertson explains.

The Dakotas were once one of the most formidable forces in the Americas, known for their brilliant political and military strategy. But after the U.S. government took their land and prohibited them from hunting or farming, the tribe was forced to accept a treaty. One of the things it promised was food payments from the Stone Warehouse.

Except that in the summer of 1862, the government, mired in the Civil War, stopped providing food. According to letters from the time, the federal agent in charge locked the warehouse, and the main trader told the Dakotas they could “eat grass or their own dung.”

Facing starvation after years of broken promises, the Dakotas declared war.

Robertson reads the beginning of the new sign, which will be written in both Dakota and English.

“The warehouse was a central scene during the outbreak of the U.S.-Dakota War in 1862,” the new sign says. “Its contents were burned out during the war but the structure remained.”

As Robertson and Annis continue down the gravel path, the new signs tell the story of the Dakotas: the arrival of the Europeans on their land, the loss of that land, the decimation of the tribe. They are plot points obscured by the old signs.

Robertson stops at one old sign that tells of a boat landing that it says “was perhaps the busiest spot at the agency which brought steamboats, supplies and even tourists here in the 1850s.”

These tourists, it says, enjoyed the “sights and sounds” of the blacksmith shop and sawmill.

But that’s not the whole story. Newspaper advertisements from 1858 show that tour guides promised tourists that they could watch Dakota warriors in traditional dress collect food payments.

“Being Native, you grow up, wherever you go, you already know it’s going to be something that’s not true,” Annis says. “It’s harmful. I have two daughters. I think about them a lot. When they come to places like this, they will be able to see themselves in different ways.”

Some of the new signs detail the Dakotas’ military successes, including a victory over a company of Fort Ridgely soldiers near the river.

But Robertson and Annis know how the story ends. The federal government marshaled hundreds of soldiers until the Dakotas surrendered and then hanged 38 of them and removed the rest of the tribe from Minnesota. Robertson says he’s not trying to change that history.

He’s trying to explain why it mattered.

“Hopefully when you read it, the sign is going to speak to you in a different and continuing way,” Robertson says. “That’s the goal of the signage. Then you would say, ‘I heard something about that,’ or ‘I want to know more about that.’ And it’s going to be alive for you. I hope.”

Throughout the rest of the state, though, the signs speak the same way they did a hundred years ago.

On a grassy median in a busy New Ulm intersection, one marker describes the “depredations of the savages” who “massacred nearly all the whites.”

Another, using a racial slur, claims Native Americans “had no pity for women or children.” In Morton, a marker praises the “brave, faithful … loyal Indians who saved the lives of white people.” Rarely are Native Americans referred to by name.

On the New Ulm courthouse lawn, a marker congratulates the settlers for creating New Ulm.

“It’s paying homage to the pioneers who founded the territory of Minnesota,” says Gebhard, the Brown County historian.

Asked whether the Dakotas could say they founded the area, Gebhard says, “Oh, absolutely. And so if the Dakotas put up a marker saying this is our homeland, they would be absolutely correct in doing so.”

But this idea of dueling markers — that stories can be told two ways, should be told in two ways — is problematic for historians.

“It doesn’t do justice to the idea that we want to tell a full and complete story,” says Chantel Rodriguez, senior public historian with the Minnesota Historical Society, which is reviewing the state’s markers. “That means weaving together the perspectives. What if you only see one marker and not the other? The reason why we feel the need to have separate markers is because we want to retain the original story.”

The courageous stories of both settler families and Native American families can be told together. But they rarely are.

On the back of the courthouse pioneer marker in New Ulm is the name of every town resident who died in the U.S.-Dakota wars fighting for their families. There’s no marker in the database that lists the names of the Dakotas who died fighting for theirs.

Gebhard said a member of the Dakotas asked her about this once.

“I was doing a downtown tour with a Dakota person, and she asked me, ‘What do people in New Ulm think about the Dakota war?'” Gebhard recalls. “And I said, ‘They don’t.’ And then this person said, ‘Well, why is that?’ And I said, ‘Because we won.'”

A murder shrouded in secrecy

When it comes to the nation’s history, though, exactly who “we” is, is no longer clear. Where once markers might have merely entertained travelers, by sheer volume over the course of a century they have become, instead, an entire nation’s history book, its first social media campaign.

They spread hate, and joy. And they have unlocked secrets, even ones from a long-forgotten murder on the edge of a two-lane highway near Gadsden, Alabama.

A local from the area, Jerry Smith, pulled his car onto U.S. 11. Asked what Gadsden is known for, he paused.

“Not a damn thing,” he said.

But that’s not true, at least not anymore. Just up this road is a new historical marker saying otherwise. Smith was just a teenager when it all started in 1963, as he drove down this highway in his green Chevrolet Corvair.

That’s when he saw a strange man walking down the road, with a sign over his body, pulling a wagon. Smith knew he was what Alabama’s then-governor, George Wallace, had warned about.

“His favorite term was ‘outside agitators,'” Smith says of Wallace. “If they would leave us alone in Alabama, everything is fine. But these ‘outside agitators’ are fanning racial fire. Well, it was George Wallace that was fanning racial fire. But, you know, early on I might have been a little too dumb to know that.”

As he slowed down to pass the man, Smith was surprised to see that he looked just like any other guy. The two locked eyes. Smith thinks the man may have even smiled a little.

So when, just a couple of hours later, someone shot the man point-blank in the face and throat and left his body on the side of the road, Smith was deeply troubled. And yet, no one dared talk about it.

“There was a lot of people that thought this guy, walking down the road pulling a buggy, we didn’t need him,” Smith remembers. “And there was some people that [said] he’s not fit for being here. We oughta kill him, you know?”

The man was William Lewis Moore, a white postal worker from Baltimore, on a one-man protest march. His murder has never been solved.

For years, it bothered Smith. What bothered him more, though, was the silence.

“The years passed by — other things happened,” Smith says. “This lost significance in the eyes of Alabamians.”

And then one day, as he was driving, it dawned on Smith what he could do about it.

“I thought, ‘At least we ought to have a plaque,'” he says.

At first, people told him not to do it. Let the past lie, they said. One person even messaged him on Facebook saying that it might be dangerous.

But Smith kept talking about it, calling people. And then one afternoon, he went and made a speech in front of the county commission, and the commissioners voted unanimously to pay for it.

On the day it was unveiled, several dozen people came out in the rain to see it.

“William Lewis Moore … was assassinated at this location during a 400-mile protest march from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi,” reads the marker, planted in a gravel patch between the road and the train tracks. Someone left flowers at its base.

Then, something strange happened. People in the community started talking openly about the murder. Moore’s death was no longer a community secret. It was history — public history — right there on the side of the road.

And now at the diner, the town museum, even the local sheriff’s office, lots of people will tell you details that many people knew: that Moore stopped at a grocery store along the road, that he got into a confrontation with the store manager in the parking lot, that the manager’s name was Floyd Simpson.

“He’s the one everyone thought did it, thinks did it,” says Johnny Grant, the assistant sheriff for Etowah County, who has spent 48 years in law enforcement here, speaking publicly about Simpson for the first time.

Grant hadn’t joined the sheriff’s office yet at the time of the murder, but some of his closest friends were on duty that night. Grant says they all suspected Simpson.

He says he even quietly reinvestigated the case years ago, when he became chief investigator, to see whether more could be done. But Simpson was already dead. He died 26 years ago.

The idea of Simpson as suspect wasn’t too much of a stretch. There was the public confrontation, for one thing. And Grant says police records show Simpson was in the Ku Klux Klan.

Plus, a witness saw what looked like Simpson’s Buick sitting on the side of the road just before the murder. And finally, a state forensic technician said he believed the bullet matched Simpson’s gun.

But the grand jury declined to indict Simpson, and people in the town put the whole thing behind them.

“The evidence, to me, I would have charged him,” Grant says, “and I would have been able to charge him now, however many years later. But they took it to the grand jury, and the grand jury refused to indict him.”

Today, Grant is also an Etowah County commissioner. When Jerry Smith came forward one day asking for marker money, Grant quickly voted yes. He says he wanted the story told.

“That was just hate,” Grant says of the murder.

He calls the marker one of the best things the county has done.

“It will always be a black eye to Etowah County,” Grant says of the killing. “I just hope as law enforcement they did everything they could to solve it.”

Now, that black eye is on the side of the road for everyone to see, part of the American story. Moore’s marker and tens of thousands of others like it are all pieces of that story, staked into the ground to mark a place in time and make it permanent.

But, like the story of William Lewis Moore’s death, how the nation sees its past keeps changing anyway.

Audio for this story was produced by Graham Smith. It was edited by Robert Little. Additional reporting by Tilda Wilson and Tirzah Christopher. Design, development and illustrations by Connie Hanzhang Jin. Graphics editing by Alyson Hurt. Digital project coordination by Desiree F. Hicks. Photo editing by Emily Bogle. Copy editing by Preeti Aroon.

Among the many hard truths for those trying to enter America’s brutal housing market, here’s one: Baby boomers continue to own many of the country’s large houses, even after their households have shrunk to one or two people.

Baby boomer empty nesters own twice as many of the country’s three-bedroom-or-larger homes, compared with millennials with kids, according to a recent analysis from Redfin. That means those larger homes aren’t hitting the market, one factor limiting the supply for the younger generations who could use those extra bedrooms.

Some baby boomers, the generation now between the ages of 60 and 78, are happy in their large homes, using the extra bedrooms for hobbies and visiting family. Others say they want to downsize, but it just doesn’t make sense financially.

Some want to downsize, but the numbers don’t add up

Sherry Murray, 73, and her husband, 80, bought their house in the North Hills of Pittsburgh in 1991, for $240,000. It’s got four bedrooms, including some they don’t use anymore. Many of her friends are in the same boat.

“What a lot of us have done is not walled off the extra bedrooms, but closed the doors, and you try not to have to maintain them,” she says. “It’s just too much house at this point.”

The house is paid off, and Murray has wanted to downsize for a while, but she says homes that fit what she’s looking for – 2,000 square feet, all on one level, in the same suburban area – sell quickly and for a lot of money.

So they’ve stayed put.

“You don’t want to be economically stupid. If my house is worth even $650,000, I don’t want to spend $1.1 million to downsize substantially, knowing that on top of that, I’m probably going to have to pay some [homeowner association] fees,” she says.

Smaller homes can cost more if they’re newer, or are part of a community that provides extra services. Some metro areas have few one-story homes, making them hot commodities.

Some homeowners are also affected by what’s known as the mortgage lock-in effect. While 54% of baby boomer homeowners own their homes free and clear, according to Redfin, most of those with mortgages have low rates. So it doesn’t make much sense to take out a new mortgage, with rates now around 7%.

“It just is a dumb economic decision to spend that much extra money for getting so much less,” Murray says.

Across the country, many baby boomers are facing their own version of this calculus: It can be cheaper — and more appealing — to stay in their current, large house, than to sell it and move to something smaller.

This doesn’t only affect younger buyers.

“You’ve got a pure housing mismatch for older homeowners. They are mismatched physically or functionally with the house that they’re in,” says Gary Engelhardt, an economist at Syracuse University who studies aging and housing markets. “That’s because it’s multifloor living. It’s stairs. It’s also other upkeep.”

Engelhardt says that’s a serious concern because it can can lead to things like falls. “And falls can be very devastating, could have very devastating health consequences, especially for the oldest old,” he says. “In general, we would like to have older homeowners … matched with their housing in a much better way than we currently have.”

So what could be done?

Engelhardt says there are basically two policy approaches to deal with what’s happening.

First, he says, is to provide subsidies or tax credits for home modifications that allow older adults to age in the homes they have. While that could make seniors’ current housing safer, it doesn’t put those houses back into the market.

Second, encourage building housing that’s well suited to older Americans, Engelhardt says: “You promote the construction of new residential units that are going to be ADA compliant, that are going to have universal design and all the types of features that lend themselves to a better match of functionality at older ages.”

For instance, the government could create a tax credit to encourage developers to build accessible housing, akin to the Low Income Housing Tax Credit that incentivizes building affordable housing.

Jenny Schuetz, a housing policy expert at the Brookings Institution, says in trying to incentivize older adults to move out of homes that are now too large for them, different tools are needed depending on their geography and financial resources. For instance, a lower-income homeowner of a deteriorating row house might be willing to a swap for a newer, smaller apartment in an elevator building, if there was a program for that.

But longtime California homeowners who’ve seen their property values skyrocket would likely require a different approach, Schuetz says. There, Proposition 13 strictly limits increases in property taxes – so that many longtime homeowners pay taxes on a small fraction of their home’s value. That created its own lock-in effect, though a recent rule change allows those over age 55 to keep their lower tax rate if they buy and move into a home of equal or lesser value.

Building more housing that’s attractive to seniors

There are other policy changes that could make it easier to build housing for different life stages and thereby entice boomers to downsize.

“I think one of the things that we know to be true is that older adults want to be able to age in their communities,” says Danielle Arigoni, managing director for Policy and Solutions at National Housing Trust. That’s where they already have friends and neighbors, doctors and bus routes they know — familiarity that makes aging in their community possible.

But many areas, including neighborhoods where a lot of baby boomers live, have zoning that only allows single-family homes. That means when older adults decide their current homes are too big, they basically have to move out of their neighborhoods.

“People want to be able to age in their communities, but there are very few options available for people who do want to do that but want to downsize,” Arigoni says.

So if cities and states want to encourage more right-sizing, they could change their zoning rules to allow more types of housing in all neighborhoods. (Cities across the country are already working to change their zoning rules, for reasons including boosting supply and lowering housing costs.)

Municipalities can also allow and encourage accessory dwelling units (ADUs), secondary dwellings like backyard cottages or basement apartments. Arigoni says these offer lots of advantages for older adults.

For instance, ADUs can be built all one level, with no steps at all. The homeowners can move into the new, smaller ADU on their property, and make money renting the larger house — allowing them to stay in the neighborhood they love, while adding a home to the rental market. The extra space can also provide housing for caregivers or family members.

Another way to unlock supply in lower-density neighborhoods is to allow homeowners with large lots to split them, generating cash for the homeowner while creating space for a new house to be built.

More housing is coming: 1.6 million homes and apartments are currently under construction in the U.S. That supply should make it easier for buyers to find homes that suit them.

In the meantime, many baby boomers are sympathetic to what the younger generations are up against.

“I really feel sorry for them,” says Guarang Patel, 67, a Maryland homeowner who’s hoping to downsize and move closer to his adult children. “They should also get the equal opportunity.”

It was an early summer morning in 2018, and Alex Patrick Umble’s family hadn’t heard from him. His mother, Maura Condon Umble, thought his absence was strange, but she didn’t panic.

“I had this important meeting that I needed to go to, I thought, and so I went to work,” Maura said.

While Maura was at work, her boss was on the phone with the Director of Public Safety at a nearby college, who reported that a young man had shot himself on the school’s athletic field.

“My boss came running down the hall, but my boss didn’t tell me,” Maura said. “He just said, ‘Maura, you need to go home right now. You need to go home. Rob needs you at home.’ And my boss kissed me on my forehead, which was very bizarre.”

Once she made it home, Maura learned that the reports were about her son. Twenty-four year old Alex had shot and killed himself days after purchasing a gun.

When gun violence in America is discussed, people typically think about mass shootings, homicides or even domestic violence. But, in fact, the majority of gun-related deaths in the United States are suicides.

In 2023, more than 42,967 people died from gun related injuries. Over half of those deaths were suicides.

Alex is one of the tens of thousands of Americans who lose their lives to suicide every year.

Adam Garber, executive director of CeaseFirePA, a research group that advocates for stricter gun laws, says big cities have typically had the highest gun death rates. But that trend has started to shift. Last year, York, a small city in Pennsylvania, had a higher per capita gun death rate than Philadelphia, Garber said.

“It is really everywhere right now,” Garber said.

Every year, more than 900 people in Pennsylvania die by gun suicides and 48 are wounded by gun suicide attempts. Suicides make up the majority of gun deaths in Pennsylvania.

“Most people who make a suicide attempt are anyone of us,” Garber said. “They’re in a moment of crisis, they got laid off from a job, they go through a divorce or a bad breakup.”

Paul Nestadt, a psychiatrist and professor at Johns Hopkins University, is one of the country’s leading researchers in suicide and what leads to it. He says most people don’t know how prevalent suicide is because we shy away from the topic in our personal relationships and in the media.

“When there’s a mass shooting or homicides, there’s a lot more coverage, and of course, those are very tragic, but suicides kind of kind of slip under the radar a little bit,” Nestadt said. “There’s not as much willingness to talk about them. I think that’s changing. It becomes hard to ignore as the rates climb.”

Easy access to guns in America has also worsened the issue, Nestadt said.

Pills are more often used in suicide attempts—though most attempts involving pills are not fatal. Yet, the smaller fraction of people who use guns to try to take their lives almost never survive.

“Most suicide attempts in the U.S. are by overdose or poisoning things like sleeping pills or Tylenol or opiates,” Nestadt said. “And yet those are usually non-fatal. Only about 2% of people that make an attempt by overdose die. But firearms, which are only used in about five or 6% of attempts, are so lethal that if you happen to have access to a firearm, when that impulse comes and you use that firearm, the chance of death is 90%.”

Nestadt says the time between the impulse and act to take one’s own life is short.

“There’s a study that finds 87% of people make that decision and act on it in the same day, about a quarter of people within 5 minutes.” Nestadt said. “And so what happens in those impulsive moments is people use what they have available to them. It comes on very quickly. If there’s nothing available, the impulse can pass.”

There is another fallacy Nestadt wants to dispel.

“There’s this myth that if someone is suicidal and is thwarted in some way or is able to survive the attempt, that they’ll just keep trying, that they’ll just find some other way. But that’s not what the data shows,” Nestadt said. “In fact, the majority of people, about 94% of people who survive a serious suicide attempt continue to survive.”

As with other forms of gun violence, raising awareness around suicide means having conversations about the very sensitive and often uncomfortable topic.

And Maura is committed to talking openly about how her son’s suicide has affected herself and her family.

Maura and her family decided to disclose Alex’s struggles with depression in his obituary. She is disappointed that suicide is a taboo topic. However, she wants to hold her local government officials accountable for having these conversations, too. So, when Pennsylvania’s Democratic Lt. Gov. Austin Davis announced plans to fund a state gun violence prevention office, she realized the proposal was missing a component.

“He did not mention gun suicide as part of the issue. I was really disappointed,” Maura said.

She thinks about what she could have done and what the state could’ve done to prevent Alex’s death. And she struggles to come up with an answer.

“I have to really give myself a pep talk that, slowly but surely, we can make some progress,” Maura said. “Maybe it will help others, even if it wouldn’t have helped Alex.”

If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 9-8-8 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — Drive west of this sprawling high desert city, past its newly built international airport, through a series of locked gates into the Audubon’s Gillmor Sanctuary and it’s like entering another world.

Or maybe better put, an other worldly landscape: the vast, and drying wetlands along the Great Salt Lake, the largest saline lake left in the western hemisphere, some fifty miles long and thirty wide.

“It’s quite an adventure to get out here,” says Carly Biedul, a wildlife biologist at nearby Westminster University. She’s part of a team of scientists who have been tracking the lake’s decline amid the West’s record megadrought made worse by climate change. They’ve been conducting weekly trips to various sampling and study sites for the last several years at the remote lake that only recently started making international headlines due to its sharp decline.

Even since its water levels peaked in the 1980s, the Great Salt Lake has always had this mysterious vibe. It’s shallow and boggy. It can stink, especially in the heat of summer.

But zero in right here at this private sanctuary – where steady water still flows in due to a complex web of agreements – and it soon becomes clear how alive this ecosystem can be and how hugely important of a stopover it is for migratory birds.

Despite recent moisture, the lake is still shrinking

2023 brought record snow to Utah, and a healthy spillover of runoff into the imperiled lake. Scientists warn the lake has already shrunk nearly in half from its historical average.

“It’s because of so many years of drought and climate change and water diversions, and we can’t keep going like that,” says Bonnie Baxter, director of the Great Salt Lake Institute.

But she says there’s still time to reverse its decline. The last two years has bought the state some time. Researchers here are already detecting sharp declines in shorebird populations such as burrowing owls and snowy plovers. As the lake and its wetlands dry, the brine shrimp the birds feed on are dying out.

“For these birds that queue into these saline habitats, there are fewer places for them to go,” says Heidi Hoven, a wetlands ecologist who helps manage the Gillmor. “All the saline lakes here in the West, and many in the world, are experiencing this loss of water and in essence that relates to a loss in habitat.”

There are plenty of culprits behind the lake drying up

Scientists say the West is believed to be as dry as it’s been in 1200 years. The megadrought made worse by climate change has been contributing to the Great Salt Lake’s decline. But agriculture usually bears the bulk of the blame. Upstream water diversions for expanding alfalfa farms and dairies has meant less and less flows into the lake. Utah’s population is also booming. Hoven says development is now running right up to the sanctuary.

“You can actually see it over your shoulder,” she gestures. “It’s this advancement of large, distribution warehouses that are within a mile from the sanctuary now where it used to be open land.”

A short, bumpy ride later along a rutted out dirt track, Hoven pulls to a stop at a favorite vista. The setting sun is casting an eerie orange glow over the distant mountains that ring the dry lake bed. It stretches for miles with just a few pools of water here or there.

It’s beautiful but also eerie, even for the trained eye of wildlife biologists like Biedul, who make weekly research trips to the lake.

“Otherworldly is a great word,” she says. “It’s crazy. We’re at Great Salt Lake right now but there’s no water. The other places where I go and sample there’s water there at least. But here we’re still at the lake and it’s dry.”

Hoven chimes in, solemnly.

“It’s just so shocking, and you know, it’s a shock to me every time I see it,” she says. “But to see someone view it for the first time. You can really see them taking it in. You never thought you could see this dryness.”

The state is being galvanized into action

But all this shock and alarm, the scientists say, may be good. It’s pressuring state leaders into action. Utah Governor Spencer Cox has pledged the lake won’t dry up on his watch. The state legislature has put upwards of a billion dollars lately into water conservation programs, most geared to farmers.

“For generations the lake was seen as kind of this dead thing that just happens to be there and will always be there,” Cox told NPR recently. “And now that people are realizing there’s a potential that it might not always be here, that’s gotten people’s attention in a positive way.”

Everything from lake effect snow for the lucrative ski industry, to mining, to air quality depends on the lake’s survival. Recent publicity around the crisis has raised public awareness but also started to bring more money which could lead to more comprehensive research that could inform everything from strategic action plans to save the lake to just understanding how the remaining migratory birds are coping.

Heidi Hoven, the wetlands ecologist, sees the shorebirds as a key indicator species.

“We have so much more to understand about what their needs are,” she says. “In these changing times, it’s really highlighting the need to understand these things quickly.”

The scientists say the last two winters may have bought Utah a little time, but no one in the West is counting on another good snow year next year.

For something that’s legally required, taxes can be tough to figure out. The U.S. system is complicated — and unfortunately, most of us never learned how to do our taxes in school.

The deadline to file your taxes this year is April 15. But it helps to get started as soon as possible.

In this guide from Life Kit, we share 6 expert tips you should know about filing your taxes — from what steps to take as the deadline approaches to whether hiring a tax preparer is worth it.

1. You don’t have to pay to file your taxes.

One free option: Download your tax forms from the IRS website, read the instructions, fill everything out and submit by mail or online. That’s easier if someone like a parent has walked you through it before, or if you have a simple tax situation like one job in one state for the entire year.

If your tax situation is more complex, there’s free online software you can use. If your adjusted gross income is $79,000 or less, you qualify for a program called IRS Free File. Find out more at the IRS website.

If you don’t qualify, you can still get deals on online tax software, says Akeiva Ellis, a certified financial planner and the cofounder of The Bemused. She uses a service called Free Tax USA; it charges $14.99 per state, and the federal return is free.

2. Consider tagging in a professional.

Another option is to go to an accountant or tax preparer. That might make sense if you’re doing your taxes for the first time or if you’ve had a major life change — like getting married or starting a new business. It may also make sense if you want to do some tax planning for the year ahead, says Andrea Parness, a CPA and certified tax coach.

If you’re looking for a pro, start by asking friends and family for referrals, she says. And then interview the person. Prepare questions for them: Will they be giving you tax advice or just filling out the forms and submitting them? Will you have an appointment? And what happens if they make a mistake?

3. Gather your documents.

The IRS has a list of documents you might need. Tax preparers can give you one too. Some common examples: W2 forms, which your employers send you by mail; student loan interest forms; bank interest forms; and any receipts for things you’re planning to take as a tax credit or deduction, like medical expenses or charitable donations.

4. Look into tax credits and deductions.

Both are benefits that save you money on taxes. A tax credit lowers your final tax bill; it comes off the top of what you owe. A tax deduction, on the other hand, “reduces the amount of income you have to pay tax on,” Ellis says.

To figure out which credits and deductions you’re eligible for, look at the IRS website. If you use software, it’ll prompt you with questions to help figure this out. So will tax preparers.

But do your research. “You certainly always want to be able to educate yourself and not just depend on someone else asking you, ‘Hey, did you buy a new car? Did you do this? Did you put your kid in daycare?’ … Everybody runs their practice differently and not everybody asks those questions,” Parness says.

5. You can file an extension — but you still have to pay.

If you think you won’t make the April 15 deadline this year, file an extension with the IRS online. Then you’ll have until mid-October to file the forms. But if you owe money, you still need to estimate how much and pay it now, or you might get hit with penalties later.

6. Plan ahead for next year.

Think about what went wrong on your tax return this year. For instance, did you end up owing a ton of money? Did you get a huge refund? That often means you gave the federal government an interest-free loan. You can make changes now so that doesn’t happen next year. For instance, “ask your employer for a W-4 form so you can properly tell them how much taxes to take out of your check,” Ellis says.

Also, look out for tax credits, deductions or rebates that you’re newly eligible for. A little planning and research now could lower your next tax bill.

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The audio portion of this episode was produced by Mia Venkat, with engineering support from Carleigh Strange, Patrick Murray, and Neil Tevault. It was edited by Meghan Keane. The digital story was edited by Danielle Nett. Our visuals editor is Beck Harlan. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.

Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or sign up for our newsletter.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced new drinking water standards Wednesday to limit exposure to a class of chemicals called PFAS.

“There’s no doubt that these chemicals have been important for certain industries and consumer uses, but there’s also no doubt that many of these chemicals can be harmful to our health and our environment,” said EPA administrator Michael Regan in a call with reporters.

This is the first time the agency has set enforceable limits on PFAS in drinking water.

PFAS stands for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances – a large group of man-made chemicals that have been used since the 1940s to waterproof and stainproof products from clothing, makeup and furniture to firefighting foam and semiconductors.

Manufactured by several large companies including Dupont and 3M, PFAS have strong molecular bonds that don’t break down for a long time, which is why they’re known as “forever chemicals.”

PFAS from the 1940s “are still in our environment today,” says Anna Reade, lead scientist on PFAS for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The levels of these chemicals keep building up in our water and our food and our air.”

Evidence for their harmful effects on human health have also accumulated. “Long term exposure to certain types of PFAS have been linked to serious illnesses, including cancer, liver damage and high cholesterol,” the EPA’s Regan said.

The EPA also noted PFAS exposure has been linked to immune and developmental damage to infants and children.

That’s why the EPA has finalized a rule restricting six PFAS chemicals in the water – individually, or in combination with each other or both – meaning water systems are required to monitor for these chemicals and remove them if they’re found above allowable levels. While some states have instituted their own PFAS limits, this is the first time it’s happening on the federal level.

Public water systems will have five years to address their PFAS problems – three years to sample their systems and establish the existing levels of PFAS, and an additional two years to install water treatment technologies if their levels are too high, senior government officials told reporters.

The EPA expects that excess PFAS levels will be found in around 6-10% of water systems, affecting some 100 million people in the U.S.

“This is historic and monumental,” says Emily Donovan, co-founder of Clean Cape Fear, an advocacy group working to protect communities from PFAS contamination. “I didn’t think [the EPA] would ever do it.” Donovan lives in an area of North Carolina which has been contaminated with PFAS from the Chemours chemical manufacturing plant.

She says seeing the EPA set limits is “validating.” Six years ago when her group first raised the issue of PFAS, she says they were told that the water met or exceeded state and federal guidelines. “And that’s because there weren’t any,” she says. “It really broke public trust for so many people in our community.”

“The final rule is a breakthrough for public health,” says Erik Olson, a senior director with NRDC. “We believe it’s going to save thousands of lives as a result of reduced exposure of tens of millions of people to these toxic chemicals in the tap water.”

There are more than 12,000 known PFAS chemicals. The six that the EPA is restricting “have had many animal and, in many cases, human studies, so [the EPA] feels confident that they have estimated the safe levels of these chemicals,” says Elizabeth Southerland, a former EPA official in the Office of Water, who left the agency in 2017.

Southerland says the new limits are a bold first step towards addressing the PFAS problem. And while the EPA has focused on only six chemicals, the treatments that water utilities use to remove these chemicals will also remove other chemicals of concern from drinking water.

In addition to other PFAS, “they will also be taking out all kinds of pesticides, pharmaceuticals and personal care products that are unregulated now under the Safe Drinking Water Act, but [which] we know have serious health effects,” Southerland says.

The agency estimates that it will cost $1.5 billion a year for water companies to comply with the regulation – for as long as PFAS continues to show up in the drinking water. “The costs are not just for a one time sampling and then putting in the treatment,” Southerland says. They include ongoing monitoring and maintaining equipment, for instance replacing carbon filters on a regular schedule.

The EPA says the benefits will equal, if not exceed the cost, in terms of less cancer, and fewer heart attacks, strokes and birth complications in the affected population.

The announcement comes with $1 billion in grants to help water systems and private well owners conduct initial testing and treatment. It’s part of a $9 billion funding package for PFAS removal in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Companies that made these chemicals are also on the hook for more than $10 billion from a class action lawsuit – money which will go to public water systems to remove PFAS.

If water systems can’t access those funds, or if the funds run out, some of those costs may eventually get passed on to consumers, says the NRDC’s Olson.