Now it comes time to update you on what was really the whole point of my road trip. Yeah the Red Sox game was nice, and seeing the places I used to live was nice as well but in the end it was really about me getting back to the Gettysburg battlefield. People often make fun of nerds but my thoughts are that everyone is a nerd about something. It all boils down to what someone loves or is passionate about or loves to study. You might be a nerd about celebrity gossip, or college basketball, or about sound engineering. My area of being a nerd is American history and most especially Civil War history. It is the first area of history that I truly studied and I have read countless books on military strategy of the war, the causes, and the aftermath of it.
I first visited Gettysburg when I was in the 4th or 5th grade. I remember taking the audio tour, what at the time was a cassette that you played as you drove by important sites of the battle and listened as the tape tried to explain to you what you were looking at. I remember only a few things from that initial tour, mostly just the tape telling you to “turn me over now”. I have since read a couple of books about the battle, Gettysburg: The Second Day by Harry Pfanz being the most detailed of them. So when it came time to plan this road trip the goal was to spend as much time there as possible, I planned on at least a full day, staying two nights so that I could maximize my time there.
I arrived Wednesday afternoon, went to the brand new visitor center which has been placed behind what were the Union lines for the battle. The new center is beautiful and instead of the old electric light map that used to display the movements of the troops during the battle they now have virtually the entire building devoted to a walk through experience. It begins showing the causes of the war, the events of the war up to the battle of Gettysburg, then three seperate rooms, one for each day of the battle with videos describing the major events of each day, then rooms devoted to the civilian impact of the battle, then a room devoted to all the events that led to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. After that I went to get some information and boy was I in for a lot of it. I found out that during the summer at least they have ranger guided walks of different parts of the battlefield all throughout the day. I was originally going to just do as much walking and self guided touring of the battlefield as I could but that was before I found out about the number of ranger walks that they offered. I arrived too late on Wednesday to really take advantage of hardly any of them but I was able to make it to the last one, a tour of the National Cemetary and the site of Lincoln’s famous speech. That however was cut short by lightning and so after that I pretty much drove around until the rain passed. I got out and went to the top of the observation tower on Culp’s Hill which afforded a pretty good view of the battlefield.
As it got close to dark I headed into town and had dinner at a restaurant in the very center of town known as Lincoln Square. I then headed to my hotel, I stayed at a Quality Inn that stood right beside what was General Lee’s headquarters during the battle. It was an old building that I stayed in but it was real nicely furnished and I couldn’t complain. I woke up early on Thursday and headed out to the first day’s battlefield. What is really nice about the battlefield is that every regiment that fought in the battle has at least three markers. A main monument to mark the center of the regiment and two smaller flanking pieces of granite or marble to mark the flanks of the regiment. This is done for all the Union regiments and it is really helpful in orienting yourself in relation to where the fighting occurred. However, I learned from the many ranger walks that I took that some of the regimental monuments placed are inaccurate, placed for political reasons or because people were seeking glory but this is true for only a few of them. For instance the members of a New York regiment sued the private organization that managed the battlefield before the Park Service took it over because they thought their regimental marker should be placed further forward. It was alleged that this regiment held back and did not help repel Pickett’s charge as they claimed, they sued to have their monument placed with everyone else’s and won. This however led to the private organization that they sued placing a monument marking where Lewis Armistead, a southern brigade commander, fell mortally wounded and this monument was placed behind the supposed line of the regiment that sued.
Anyways, I took a ranger walk on Thursday morning that hiked over a portion of Cemetery Ridge where Pickett’s charge was repulsed. This took about an hour and a half and afterwards I went back into town. I found out there was a Mort Kunstler gallery in the middle of town and I stopped by. I already have two prints by him and I went in there looking for a third. I managed to find this one which I really liked…
It shows Stonewall Jackson, probably the most capable southern general behind General Lee with his horse under the trees. Jackson’s last words were “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees”. If it were not for Jackson being mortally wounded at Chancellorsville I think the south would have won the war and for that very reason I think God chose to call him home early. Either way I liked it and bought it.
After that I took two more ranger walks, one describing the sacrifice of a Union battery that provided time for reinforcements to come up and one of Little Round Top which helped to dispel some of the myths that the movie Gettysburg helped to create. I ended the day going to a seminar held at the amphitheater about General Meade, the leader of the Union forces at Gettysburg. All in all a long day and one that I will not soon forget.
It was hard to leave the following morning, I wanted to spend even more time going over the battlefield. Either way I had to keep moving and so I eventually had to make my way to Altoona. Though one of these days I’m going to plan even more time to go there. I look forward to what they are going to do to the battlefield. They have previously allowed parts of the battlefield to grow unattended, leading to large forests where there were none during the battle. The plan is to level these forests and return the battlefield to it’s original state wherever possible. This will lead to new lines of sight and allow for easier study. I already can’t wait to go back.
