Ottawa High School juniors Lindsay Frank and Anna Stone have been best friends since kindergarten.

Anna Stone and Lindsay Frank, juniors from Ottawa High School, won first place at the National History Day Competition during the week of June 13-17 at the University of Maryland, College Park, Md. This is their sixth year at the competition and their third time to nationals.

And, they’re inseparable.

“I tease them about being a package deal,” said Candie Campbell, the girls’ history teacher.

In sixth grade, they were placed in the same gifted class. It was there that they were introduced to National History Day, a competition of about 500,000 students. The program encourages youths to research and interpret history in their own way and create projects based on their conclusions.

The girls loved the idea of making history come to life, and on June 17, after six years of competing in the program, Stone and Frank won the national competition in Washington, D.C., and $1,000. Their project — following this year’s theme of innovation — was based on Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” and social reform in the United States.

It took Stone and Frank nine months to complete their research and finish their project, during which they found a connection between Sinclair and Girard, Kan., a town about 20 miles north of Pittsburg.

In 1905, Sinclair was hired by the socialist newspaper, Appeal to Reason, in Girard, to investigate the meat packing district in Chicago. His experiences appeared in the newspaper as a series and were the inspiration for “The Jungle.”

“It was cool, because we found that history really can be just down the road,” Stone said.

At the local competition in February, Frank and Stone won first place by default because they were the only project in their category.

In April, competing with nine other teams at the state level, Frank and Stone again placed first. The victory also meant a trip to the finals for the third time.

Frank said they tried not to get their hopes up about winning at nationals. They were up against 85 teams from around the country.

At the awards ceremony, the girls waited as the judges announced the third place winner and then the second — another team that had used social reform as its topic. With only one shot left at an award, they thought their chances were slim.

Then they heard it:

“First place,” one of the judges said, “from Ottawa, Kan., …”

Frank and Stone jumped out of their seats in excitement.

After three times at nationals, six years of research and 11 years of friendship — Stone said she and Frank had finally become the ones she used to look up to at National History Day.