An exhibit about nine people enslaved by George Washington must be restored at his former home in Philadelphia after President Donald Trump’s administration took it down last month, a federal judge ruled on Presidents Day, the federal holiday honoring Washington’s legacy.

The city of Philadelphia sued in January after the National Park Service removed the explanatory panels from Independence National Historical Park, the site where George and Martha Washington lived with nine of their slaves in the 1790s, when Philadelphia was briefly the nation’s capital.

The removal came in response to a Trump executive order “restoring truth and sanity to American history” at the nation’s museums, parks and landmarks. It directed the Interior Department to ensure those sites do not display elements that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”

U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe ruled Monday that all materials must be restored in their original condition while a lawsuit challenging the removal’s legality plays out. She prohibited Trump officials from installing replacements that explain the history differently.

Rufe, an appointee of Republican President George W. Bush, began her written order with a quote from George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” and compared the Trump administration to the book’s totalitarian regime called the Ministry of Truth, which revised historical records to align with its own narrative.

“As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims — to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts,” Rufe wrote. “It does not.”

She had warned Justice Department lawyers during a January hearing that they were making “dangerous” and “horrifying” statements when they said Trump officials can choose which parts of U.S. history to display at National Park Service sites.

The Interior Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling, which came while government offices were closed for the federal holiday.

The judge did not provide a timeline for when the exhibit must be restored. Federal officials can appeal the ruling.

The historical site is among several where the administration has quietly removed content about the history of enslaved people, LGBTQ+ people and Native Americans.

Signage that has disappeared from Grand Canyon National Park said settlers pushed Native American tribes “off their land” for the park to be established and “exploited” the landscape for mining and grazing.

Last week, a rainbow flag was taken down at the Stonewall National Monument, where bar patrons rebelled against a police raid and catalyzed the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. The administration has also removed references to transgender people from its webpage about the monument, despite several trans women of color being key figures in the uprising.

The Philadelphia exhibit, created two decades ago in a partnership between the city and federal officials, included biographical details about each of the nine people enslaved by the Washingtons at the home, including two who escaped.

Among them was Oney Judge, who was born into slavery at the family’s plantation in Mount Vernon, Virginia, and later escaped from their Philadelphia house in 1796. Judge fled north to New Hampshire, a free state, while Washington had her declared a fugitive and published advertisements seeking her return.

Because Judge had escaped from the Philadelphia house, the park service in 2022 supported the site’s inclusion in a national network of Underground Railroad sites where they would teach about abolitionists and escaped slaves. Rufe noted that materials about Judge were among those removed, which she said “conceals crucial information linking the site to the Network to Freedom.”

Only the names of Judge and the other eight enslaved people — Austin, Paris, Hercules, Richmond, Giles, Moll and Joe, who each had a single name, and Christopher Sheels — remained engraved in a cement wall after park service employees took a crowbar to the plaques on Jan. 22.

Hercules also escaped in 1797 after he was brought to Mount Vernon, where the Washingtons had many other slaves. He reached New York City despite being declared a fugitive slave and lived under the name Hercules Posey.

Several local politicians and Black community leaders celebrated the ruling, which came while many were out rallying at the site for its restoration.

State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, a Philadelphia Democrat, said the community prevailed against an attempt by the Trump administration to “whitewash our history.”

“Philadelphians fought back, and I could not be more proud of how we stood together,” he said.

Spend some time staring at the famous painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” and you can’t miss the ice. It’s everywhere. Cold weather became part of Washington’s military strategy, says Alex Robb, an educator at Washington Crossing Historic Park outside Philadelphia. “It does a lot to impede the crossing and endanger the whole operation,” he said, “but it actually becomes our shield.”

At the end of 1776, after a string of losses, Washington’s army was on the verge of collapse. But Robb says that on Christmas, with ice forming in the Delaware River, the enemy assumed it was too dangerous for the Americans to cross.

They were wrong … and the cold weather handed Washington the element of surprise. His victory at Trenton was a sign that the war could still be won.

Robb said, “Looking back, had the weather proven more mild, they most definitely would’ve encountered resistance outside Trenton.”  Just a few degrees made the difference between winning and losing a battle.

At that time, Americans were used to colder winters. We know that from Thomas Jefferson’s meticulous, handwritten weather records. But since then, winter has gotten warmer. “Ever since Washington was here, there has been a steady increase,” said Jen Brady, a data analyst at the science non-profit Climate Central. Their research shows that average winter temperatures in the Philadelphia area have gone up and down over the years. But overall, they are now 5.5 degrees warmer than they were in 1970.

As for the current weather conditions around Washington Crossing, Pa., Brady said, “It will continue to snow. There will continue to be cold in cold places. But there will be less of it.”

“It’s a time machine”

The best evidence of our changing climate comes from ice cores – long tubes of ice extracted out of glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica. And inside the ice core are perfectly-preserved air bubbles. The deeper you drill, the older the bubbles. “It’s this sort of magical way of going back in time,” said Eric Steig, a glaciologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “It’s a time machine.”

Steig showed us one ice core that dates from 1776, containing tiny pockets of air from that time. “So, like, you’re breathing a little bit of the air that George Washington breathed,” Steig said.

Those bubbles contain carbon dioxide, a gas that helps regulate Earth’s temperature. And for 800,000 years the carbon levels found in ice cores have gone up and down, but never above 300 parts per million – not until around 1800, when they started to take off.

What changed at that point to make that spike? “We began burning fossil fuels, and we’re doing it really fast,” Steig said.

Since the Industrial Revolution, which began around the time of the American Revolution, our cars, factories, and power plants have been burning oil and gas and emitting massive amounts of carbon dioxide. That has led to warmer temperatures, which can intensify extreme floods, droughts and fires.

Steig said, “It would seem to me it’s good for people to understand things have changed, and will continue to change, and have an understanding of what to expect going forward.”

So, it turns out, around the time Washington looked out on the icy Delaware, there were two important pictures coming into focus: One, the story of America; the other, the beginnings of climate change.

And both continue to shape our world.

What would Washington say if he showed up in 2026? Steig replied, “You pluck somebody from that time period, they would see things having changed quite dramatically.”

     
For more info:

• Alex Robb, Washington Crossing Historic Park, Washington Crossing, Pa.
• Jennifer Brady, senior data analyst and research manager, Climate Central
• Eric Steig, glaciologist, College of the Environment, University of Washington, Seattle
• Thanks to Martin Froger Silva, University of Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership, and the U.S. Ice Drilling Program

      
Story produced by Robert Marston. Editor: Chad Cardin. 

    
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