As Valley Forge Road winds through familiar Chester County landscape, there lays a woodsy campus hidden from view.
Known as the Medal of Honor Grove, the 42-acre memorial near Phoenixville honors more than 3,500 of the most decorated military heroes in American history. Conceived by Dwight D. Eisenhower and General Omar Bradley in 1964, it is recognized as the oldest memorial of its kind in the country.
If you’ve never been, here’s your chance in celebration of Memorial Day.
Located at Founding Forward, formerly known as Freedoms Foundation in Valley Forge, the idea for the Grove included that every state gets its own acre of woodland, rather than a single monument for memorialization. A tree planted for each recipient. Every name gets marked.
The land itself speaks in remembrance.
The memorial is unlike most that visitors have encountered. Walking paths carry you through sections representing all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. Obelisks bear state seals and individual stainless-steel markers identify each recipient by name, rank, unit, and the date and place of their act of valor.
There are more than 3,500 markers in total. On a quiet morning, moving from state to state and reading each name is something a single statue could never achieve.
Near the entrance, a separate memorial honors more than 150 immigrant recipients who had no home state to claim. America’s Walk of Honor, dedicated in 1997, begins the experience with a commemorative pathway whose first stone was designed by pop artist Peter Max.
The Grove also contains more than 50 tree and shrub varieties, including a Cedar of Lebanon, a Landsdowne Sycamore, and a Valley Forge American Elm, earning it Level 1 arboretum accreditation in 2019. The Pennsylvania Audubon Society has certified it as a bird habitat.
Plus, on the Founding Forward campus, 90 volumes of research on Medal of Honor recipients sit in an archive: photographs, sketches, biographies, handwritten citations.
Chester County has helped make sure that the Grove lasts. In 2017, the land was placed under a permanent conservation easement alongside Schuylkill Township, and the Natural Lands Trust, forever protecting it from development.
What visitors tend to find inside the Grove, is that the experience moves more slowly and more deeply than expected. As families linger at markers and veterans go quiet, children ask questions that don’t always have easy answers. The self-guided layout invites people to set their own pace, and the setting of shaded trails encourages unhurried reflection that Memorial Day is supposed to be about.
The Grove is open 365 days a year from dawn to dusk and it’s free to visit. Leashed pets are also welcome.
Memorial Day weekend will be filled with the usual traditions. If you have an hour to spare, the Medal of Honor Grove offers a place that takes the holiday seriously, set on one of the most extraordinary pieces of land in Chester County.
After all, it has been waiting largely undiscovered for sixty years.
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