On a beautiful night recently, I was driving through White Hall as the sun started to set, and there wasn’t much passing traffic. It was a peaceful moment…a welcome break near the end of what had been a stressful week. As I drove past the little White Hall Museum, I saw a sign that caught my eye and pulled the car around to stop and look.

The fading words on the sign identified this road as a Blue Star Memorial Highway, A Tribute to the Nation’s Armed Forces who served in World War II. I was standing alone looking at the sign on the 80th anniversary of D-Day. Perhaps the most significant day in world history. The day Allied forces, under the direction of General Dwight David Eisenhower, began the Normandy invasion. If you were a 19-year-old in one of the initial landing boats to hit the beach, there was a 90% chance you would die that day.

The single age group that had the most American men fighting in the war was 19-year-olds. That statistic always makes me pause. They were kids, really, and they went to the other side of the world to liberate Europe, end the holocaust, and defeat Hitler. They came from a thousand American towns just like White Hall. Towns like this that made the guns, ammunition, and vehicles that won the war. Towns like this that grieved the loss of the men who never came home.

A Federal Highway Administration article says the idea of designating roads to honor the Americans who served in the war started in New Jersey.

The Blue Star Memorial Highways are a tribute to the armed forces that have defended the United States of America. The National Garden Clubs, Inc., is the parent organization for Blue Star Memorial Highways.

The idea dates to 1944 when the New Jersey State Council of Garden Clubs beautified a 5½-mile stretch of U.S. 22 from Mountainside to North Plainfield. Approximately 8,000 dogwood trees were planted as a living memorial to the men and women in the Armed Forces from New Jersey. The Blue Star, taken from the blue star in the service flag, was chosen to symbolize the memorial because it was used during World War II on flags and homes of families that had a son or daughter in the service. The New Jersey Legislature approved a Joint Resolution on January 22, 1945, designating this highway “Blue Star Drive.”

The idea that started in North Plainfield, New Jersey in the years after the war was embraced nationally, and 80 years later the sign still stands proudly beside the little museum at the side of the road in White Hall. The museum is freshly painted, and monuments to the men who died later in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan sit nearby. The grass is well-tended. There is nothing about the little museum and the sign on the edge of the road that would indicate this community cares any less about this country 80 years after D-Day.

It makes me proud to live in a state with towns where things like this still matter. In a country that spends time talking about what books should or should not be sitting on shelves in school libraries, we don’t seem to be spending much time teaching our children about World War II. But in the front yard of this modest museum, I am struck by the fact that multiple generations have cared for the monuments here for eight decades. Maybe we are actually passing the right history lessons down to our children.

You only really discover American history when you get off the interstates and drive on the back roads that have been the lifeblood of our little state for so long. Roads with diners where you can still get a perfect cup of coffee and hear the complaints about the football coach. Roads that bring jobs and economic growth to towns like this. Back roads where you can still be reminded that 80 years ago today the boys from places like White Hall picked up arms to defend this amazing country.

Roads that carried the buses that took the local young men off to World War II and later brought some of them home. They came home and quietly built businesses and communities and created jobs, sat on school boards, and built a new post-war America. They were the greatest generation. Just ask the people who take care of the museum and the sign beside the road in White Hall.