Gilded Age
Reconstruction to the turn of the century: immigration, railroads, mills, and the mansions the new fortunes built.
10 landmarks across 7 states and the District of Columbia. Start with Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and Biltmore Estate.
- Landmarks
- 10
- Period
- 1865–1900
- World Heritage
- 1
Pictured Statue of Liberty
Christian David · CC BY-SA · via Wikimedia Commons
The Landmarks
- Gilded Age
Statue of Liberty
New York (Liberty Island), NY
The Statue of Liberty — formally Liberty Enlightening the World — was a gift from the people of France to the United States, dedicated on October 28, 1886.
Gilded AgeEllis Island
New York, NY
For more than six decades, Ellis Island in New York Harbor was the front door to America.
Gilded AgeBiltmore Estate
Asheville, NC
Biltmore is the largest privately owned house in the United States — a 250-room French Renaissance château that George Washington Vanderbilt II raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina at the height of the Gilded Age.
Gilded AgeBrooklyn Bridge
New York, NY
When it opened in 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge was the longest suspension bridge in the world and an engineering marvel that stitched together Manhattan and Brooklyn across the East River.
Gilded AgeThe Breakers
Newport, RI
The Breakers is the grandest of Newport's Gilded Age 'summer cottages' — a 70-room Italian Renaissance palazzo built for Cornelius Vanderbilt II, whose family's railroad fortune made them the richest in America.
Gilded AgeLowell National Historical Park
Lowell, MA
Lowell was where America built its first factory city from scratch, and where the Industrial Revolution first put thousands of young women to work under one roof.
Gilded AgePullman National Historical Park
Chicago, IL
George Pullman set out to build a workers' utopia on Chicago's South Side, a meticulously planned company town that would eliminate the vice and squalor of industrial slums.
Gilded AgeLibrary of Congress
Washington, DC
Born from a wartime loss and rebuilt on Thomas Jefferson's own library, the Library of Congress grew into the largest library in the world — a monument to the Enlightenment conviction that a democracy depends on an informed citizenry.
Gilded AgeHotel del Coronado
Coronado, CA
One of the largest wooden buildings ever raised in America, built in under a year on a barren sandspit, the 'Hotel Del' turned a remote California peninsula into a Gilded Age resort destination and a Hollywood backdrop.
Gilded AgeThomas Edison National Historical Park
West Orange, NJ
The industrial-scale laboratory where roughly half of Edison's 1,093 patents were born, including the world's first motion picture studio, a rotating tar-paper shed that helped invent the movies.
Historical Essays
- Gilded Age
Gilded Age America: The Mansions and the Mills
The Vanderbilts built palaces in Newport and the Blue Ridge; the workers of Lowell and Pullman built the fortunes behind them. Four landmarks show both sides of America's industrial boom.
Old USA Editors · 2 min read · September 28, 2026
- Gilded Age
Three Openings: New York Harbor, 1883 to 1892
In less than a decade New York Harbor gained a bridge, a statue and an island that would define it — the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.
Old USA Editors · 2 min read · September 28, 2026