Cabrillo's 100th Birthday Party, Canceled During Shutdown, Rescheduled

The celebration is back on. Canceled due to the government shutdown, officials with Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego had to figure out new dates for its 100th anniversary celebration, an event that's taken a long time to plan out.

Commemorative events will now take place the weekend of December 7 and 8, with the anniversary ceremony on Sunday at 3 p.m. The celebration is being combined with World War Two -- Fort Rosecrans Goes to War, an event that delves into the park's military history. A full calendar of events can be found on the centennial website.

Cabrillo is run by the National Park Service, which not only manages epic landscapes such as Yosemite or Death Valley, but places set aside to remember American history (like California's two World War II internment camps, Manzanar and Tule Lake where Japanese Americans were forced to live, César E. Chávez's former home and headquarters for the United Farmworkers of America in Kern County, and Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front in the San Francisco Bay Area, which honors the work done during the war, especially by women and African Americans).

For its part, Cabrillo was set aside by President Woodrow Wilson to honor Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, who discovered the present day U.S. West Coast for Spain. He is said to have first stepped foot onto the land in 1542 near the monument. The monument has a history of things never going as planned, and was closed during World War II. The park now honors its military history, too, as well as its ecosystem of tidepools, kelp forest, and land habitat.

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