We stayed at a very unique Hostel, Ironmaster's Mansion, located in Pine Grove Furnace State Park just north of the town of Gettysburg. Built in 1829, it was the home of the ironmaster of the Pine Grove Furnace Ironworks. The company made cannonballs during the Revolutionary War and the house served as a stop on the underground railroad for runaway slaves.
The hostel is actually on the midpoint of the Appalachian Trail and chiefly serves as a one-night rest stop for hikers on the trail. The manager was surprised to even have guests in the winter - especially ones who stayed more than one night! Their bulletin board was filled with post cards from people after they had finished hiking. Again it made us consider if thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail was on our long "to do" list of life.
Old Alms House Cemetery
Many agree that the small town of Gettysburg served as a turning point of the Civil War during the summer of 1863. General Lee was on the move into Union territory with the Army of North Virginia, passing through Maryland and into Pennsylvania. More men died at the Battle of Gettysburg than in any other battle fought in North America before or since. It's hard to think of it as "a" battle. Consisting of several large conflicts and countless skirmishes, it lasted over 3 days in the balmy July heat of southern Pennsylvania.
We started our exploration of the area at the Gettysburg National Military Visitor Center. The center was recently renovated for a staggering $135 million! And it showed. You know those "Excelerator" hand dryers in the bathrooms that blow the skin off your hands? Well they've got 'em.
44th New York Infantry Tower Monument
We first watched a very informative video entitled "A New Birth of Freedom" that was narrated by Morgan Freeman (no surprise there). Then we made our way through the musuem that had just the right amount of information - not too much and not too little.
Well maybe there was too much to recount here, so here's just a few details we learned about...
1861 saw the first flag of the Confederate - the Stars and Bars - with 11 stars to represent the states of the Confederate. In 1863, the flag was changed to the more familiar design to avoid confusion on the battlefield. The U.S. flag retained its 34 stars throughout the war. The U.S. government never recognized the right of the Confederate states to secede.
The first fighting of the Civil War broke out at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, with Confederate forces capturing the fort after a Union surrender 34 hours later. Abner Doubleday, a Union solder, later wrote that he believed the first shot "seemed to bury itself in the masonry about a foot from my head, in very unpleasant proximity to my right ear." Amazingly, the drawn out bombardment didn't result in a single Union casualty. The Union would spend the next 4 years attempting to retake the fort.
Volunteers comprised both armies for some time, but by April of 1862 the Confederacy instituted a draft and the Union followed suit the next year. To avoid the draft, a man could pay a fee or hire a substitute. Valentine Bechler, a New Jersey soldier, lamented, "For the rich man, so he can make more money, the poor man should risk his life and I should get slaughtered." In the south, one white male was exempt from every plantation with 20 or more slaves.
Abraham Lincoln wrote of the Emancipation Proclamation, "I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper." The Emancipation freed all slaves in the Confederate lands still opposed to the Union - and every escaped slave from the South resulted in one less laborer for the war effort and the possibility of them fighting for the Union. What most people forget (us included) is that Lincoln did not free all the slaves. It did not include those slaves in the "border states" - Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware - or those slaves in Union-occupied Confederate land. Lincoln feared losing the border states to the Confederacy and did not feel he had the right to free slaves in states that were still part of the U.S.
Also included in the visitor center is a painting by Paul Philippoteaux called the "Battle of Gettysburg" cyclorama. The painting was completed in 1844 and forms a huge cylinder - about 27 feet high and 359 feet in circumference. It provides a 360 degree view of the battle during Pickett's charge. It's like standing in the middle of a giant diorama. There were props and artifacts arranged in front of the painting, giving the illusion of a seamless perspective out into the distance.
Our next day was spent exploring the battlefield itself. There is a self-guided auto tour that's about 24 miles long, taking you near all the important landmarks of the battle.
Can you believe there are over 1,300 monuments and historical markers in the park? We didn't even try to count. Some are marble behemoths, others are huge bronze statues, and many are simple chiseled stone markers designating where a unit or brigade was located. Of course they didn't appear overnight. In the 1880's the monument-placing-pace picked up, and eventually every Union regiment that fought at Gettysburg erected at least one monument. Their style and design are quite varied, but there is some rhyme or reason.
For instance, the circular bases (pictured above) are confederate brigade markers and the square bases are union brigade markers.
Also, whenever you see a vertical canon (pictured above) that is where a headquarters was located.
The most magnificant monuments are those honoring individual states.
North Carolina Monument
One of the most moving state monuments was the one for North Carolina. It was dedicated on July 3, 1929 and the sculptor was Gutzon Borglum (yep, the same guy that did Mount Rushmore - man, he really got around). About 14,000 soldiers from North Carolina fought at Gettysburg and more than 6,100 were killed, wounded, or missing - more than from any other Confederate state.
The last stop on the auto tour was the Soldier's National Cemetery.
Gettysburg was the largest battle ever fought in the western hemisphere. It also produced the greatest bloodshed: 10,000 killed or mortally wounded, nearly 30,000 wounded, and almost 10,000 captured or missing. The town was left in shambles yet recovery efforts began immediately after the battle. Many of the dead were hastily buried in shallow graves within one week of the battle. The crude graves were seen as temporary solution for the disposal of the dead, and were completed quickly for fear that an epidemic might spread in the hot, humid summer conditions. The markings of these burials were also very rough and temporary, typically a wooden board with the soldier's name written in pencil and placed at the head of his grave. Many of the identifications were lost - and this led to the need for permanent burials and thus the Soldier's National Cemetery.
Pennsylvania governor Andrew Curtin spearheaded the effort to purchase 17 acres to serve as the Gettysburg National Cemetery. Dedication of the cemetery occurred on November 19, 1863 - just 4 1/2 months after the battle. Edward Everett of Massachusetts was the main speaker of the day, and "delivered a well-received two-hour oration rich in historical detail and classical allusion." He was a former governor, congressman, senator and secretary of state - and one of the most famous orators of the day. Have you ever heard of him? Me neither.
Another speaker was asked to make "a few appropriate remarks." President Abraham Lincoln then spoke for about two minutes - 272 words - and gave what became known as the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln saw his own speech at Gettysburg as an opportunity to help define for the nation what was at stake in the war and why a Union victory was crucial. "I should be glad," Everett told Lincoln, "if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes." I just wish some of my professors had taken a leaf out of Lincoln's (concise) book.
The Rostrum (the brick speaker's stand at the entrance to the cemetery) was built in 1879. Lincoln didn't speak from this platform, but six U.S. presidents used it during Memorial Day services and other ceremonies (Rutherford B. Hayes - 1878, Teddy Roosevelt - 1904, Calvin Coolidge - 1928, Herbert Hoover - 1930, Franklin D. Roosevelt - 1934, and Dwight Eisenhower - 1955).
The Lincoln Speech Memorial is not the location of Lincoln's speech, but a memorial for the speech itself - and probably the only memorial to a speech.
Soldier's National Monument
The center of the cemetery is marked by the Soldier's National Monument. The shaft of the monument supports a statue of the "Genius of Liberty," and is surrounded by four other marble figures that represent:
- War - an American soldier speaking to the second monument about the battle of Gettysburg
- History - a woman recording the names and accomplishments of the soldiers that died
- Plenty - a woman representing peace after the war by holding wheat and displaying cornucopias
- Peace - a male mechanic shown with a hammer and cogs
Radiating out from the Soldier's National Monument are wide semi-circles of gravestones - 3,500 Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg. Burials are organized around state sections, divided into an inner ring for smaller states and an outer ring for larger states. Men of different rank and position rest side-by-side.
The larger gray stones are state section markers and show number fallen from each state. The long stones set nearly at ground level are gravestones for the remains of the soldiers with marked names. And the hundreds of small marble squares bearing only numbers are for the Unknown, of which there were 979.
In addition to attempts at identification, each soldier received a proper burial with the remains being placed in a pine coffin which was then buried to a depth of four feet. The reburials were not completed until March 1864 - about 4 months after the dedication of the cemetery.
The Confederate dead remained buried on the battlefield. Between 7 and 10 years after the battle, the Southern remains (over 2300 altogether) were returned home to four primary locations - Richmond, VA, Raleigh, NC, Savannah, GA, and Charleston, SC.
While over 10,000 died at Gettysburg alone, during the four years of the Civil War over 620,000 Americans perished. There are 3,307 post-Civil War burials in the cemetery. The cemetery contains the remains of American soldiers and dependents from the Civil War through Vietnam.
"It is easy to forget that each grave represents not only a victim of war, but also the unseen victims at home - wives, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and children, who all mourned the passing of a loved one."
