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If you didn’t get a chance to add some paint to a fence post or clean up trash or just plain make a visit to a battlefield or historic building on Park Day in March, another opportunity comes up in June.

The McLean House at Appomattox Court House National Historical Park. (Norm Shafer - FOR THE WASHINGTON POST)

Sponsored by the American Hiking Association, the annual National Trails Day is a celebration of the country’s 200,000 miles of urban and rural trails and is meant to get the public outside to enjoy them.

Some Civil War sites have joined in the effort. Although the official day is June 2, some of the events are taking place on the next weekend.

At the Appomattox Court House National Historic Site in Virginia, volunteers are invited to scrape and paint a large section of fence that begins at the courthouse and ends at the parking lot, from 8:45 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. on June 2.

One hundred and fifty years ago today, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law a Congressional act establishing a Department of Agriculture. Lincoln had told Congress an agricultural bureau would suffice but enthusiastic lawmakers wanted a department instead.

Five days later, Lincoln would sign the Homestead Act that provided 160 acres of public land to any American who was the head of a family and was over 21 years old.

(Associated Press)

Three of the more than 1,300 memorials at Gettysburg National Military Park will be given a thorough cleaning and polishing during June, according to the National Park Service.

The work will necessitate closing the upper observation decks and first floor of the battlefield’s much-visited State of Pennsylvania Monument between about June 8 and June 28. The other, smaller monuments — the New York State Monument in the Soldiers’ National Cemetery and the State of Vermont Monument on Hancock Avenue — are scheduled for work between June 4 and June 6.

The Civil War Trust , state of Virginia and the Northern Regional Park Authority have joined forces to protect the five-acre Fort Defiance section of the Middleburg Battlefield. The project was announced Wednesday at a joint press conference in Middleburg.

Map of Battle of Middlefield (Courtesy Civil War Trust)

Located on busy Rt. 50, an important transportation road both during the Civil War and now, the five-acre property includes an antebellum manor-house-turned-tavern, blacksmith house and shop. It played a key role in the successful efforts by the Confederates to keep Union forces from interfering with the Army of Northern Virginia as it moved through the Blue Ridge Mountains heading for Maryland in 1863.

The sprawling Cedar Creek Battlefield in Middletown, Va. now has its very own app, thanks to the Civil War Trust . This is the sixth free battlefield app for the Trust and maybe the most necessary one because the Battle of Cedar Creek , on Oct, 19, 1864, played out over eight square miles and across modern day I-81. There were also two distinct parts of the battle: a Confederate victory in the morning and a Union victory in the afternoon.

The app takes on all these challenges with multiple features including video segments from well-versed historians, period and modern pictures and a detailed topographical map. A GPS navigation guide resolves the multiple sites problem and makes finding them easy by numbering each place, some several miles apart.

The app  is available for iPhone and Android users.

Included on the tour are two parcels the Trust expects to purchase very soon, which will then be passed on to the National Park Service. When that happens, the park service will begin to construct parking areas and pathways. One is the 8th Vermont Regiment monument .and the other is the place where Major General Philip H. Sheridan was able to rally his retreating soldiers and then begin a counterattack to successfully reclaim the lost land.

Other sites are owned by one of five partner organizations that make up the country’s first public-private national park, the Cedar Creek and Belle Grove National Historical Park. The partners — the Trust, the park service, the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation , the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation — cooperated on the project so all the land preserved by the individual partners is included in the app, creating a unified interpretation of the area.

The Trust expects to continue creating apps; the next two planned are for Petersburg and Second Manassas.