The America's National Parks Podcast is sponsored by L.L. Bean.

This year, L.L. Bean is joining up with the National Park Foundation,

the official non-profit partner of the National Park Service to help you find your happy place in an amazing system of more than 400 national parks including historic and cultural sites, monuments, preserves, lakeshores, and seashores

that dot the American landscape,

many of which you'll find just a short trip from home.

L.L. Bean is proud to be an official partner of the National Park Foundation.

Discover your perfect day in a park at find your park.com. In 1833 a small organization formed with the purpose to fund and build a monument unparalleled in the world,

in honor of once commander-in-chief of the Continental Army and the first President of the United States.

Its completion and its history, not unlike the Statue of Liberty, was fraught with funding

issues, construction delays, and outside forces seemingly

teamed against it.

Today on America's National Parks, the Washington Monument, part of the National Mall and Memorial Parks in Washington, D.C.

Here's Abigail Trebue. you. As far back as the victory in the Revolutionary War, proposals began flooding in

to commemorate American hero George Washington.

In 1783, the Continental Congress had determined that an equestrian statue of George Washington

be erected at the place where the residents of Congress shall be established.

But it wasn't until his death in 1799 that a different type of monument would be considered.

John Marshall, a representative from Virginia who later became Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, proposed that a tomb be erected within the

capital. A lack of funds in disagreement over what type of vision for the memorial, coupled

with the Washington family's hesitation to move of the Memorial in the Capitol, but the decision was reversed when the Jeffersonian Republicans took

control of Congress in 1801. Washington had become the symbol of the Federalist Party,

their adversaries, and they were reluctant to construct an effigy in

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