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I don't research everything. I just try to confirm what I think I already know. On the ship, I first checked DANFS for the dates of the Long Beach and the Enterprise, then quickly looked up the Savannah so I didn't miss an obvious hit. After ruling them out, I looked for Russian icebreakers. One of the sites gave me the name of the first one, as well as the names of a German and a Japanese ship which were contemporaries of the Savannah. I then googled on the Russian ship to confirm its launch date. Perhaps 10 or 15 minutes on Google.

The National Park was more involved, and I'm still not happy with the documentation. I wasted a lot of time on the National Park Service site. (A lot of PDF junk on there, that I didn't bother to open.) Along the way, I found the first National Seashore (let's wait and see if that turns up on the appropriate state list). My guess is that the actual winner will turn out to be a War Department purchase of a battlefield site before the NPS took those over. For example, Kennesaw Mountain started with the purchase of a small tract of land for a memorial erected by the State of Illinois (1899) was transferred to the War Department in 1917, and to the National Park Service in 1933. Most of its growth occured while under the War Department. http://ngeorgia.com/travel/kennesawmtn.html

But I'm missing the link to show who paid for the expansion.