Many young people live in communities with historically interesting buildings, and tours of those historical sites can reveal much about life in the past. Something that students often overlook in the analysis of historic sites is the civic values held by the people who lived there. The ideas of architecture cannot be divorced from the people or commonly held ideas of a given time; many early American buildings, for example, reveal a deep respect for democratic ideals. A teacher tried to make that evident on a sunny September day as the fourth-grade children from Washington Elementary School took a field trip to the Lanier home, where they learned how the architectural styles in that building represented democratic ideals. In this article, the author suggests that teachers can expand students' knowledge of individual rights and responsibilities through purposeful planning and execution rather than counting on accidental exposure.