Gettysburg

This weekend I was itching to get out of town, and to be quite honest, I would have preferred somewhere a little warmer and a little farther (like Florida. Or Spain), but instead we settled for 80 miles north to the Gettysburg battlefield. And this way SS could come along, which made it a bit more worth it. ;) 

Gettysburg National Military Park has a rather ostentatious new museum and visitors center, and I'm sure the displays were very nice, but I wouldn't know. We were feeling a little cheap (surprised?), so we skipped the $36/person total package and opted to create our own tour using a brochure the lays out a 24 mile driving tour of the area and a printout of the Wikipedia article on Gettysburg. If I’d had the money, I might have paid the $65 to have a personal guide ride in our car with us and tell us all about the sites. We saw them at almost every stop, and they seemed to know everything—a true dream job for a Civil War nerd. 

My overall impression was just how huge the battlefield is (at one point the Confederate line was over 5 miles long) and in the 3 1/2 hours we were there we only saw the major highlights. Even though I’ve read about the battle and studied it in history class and seen the movie Gettysburg, I still imagined a nice mostly open field where the soldiers lined up to slaughter each other. Not so, however.  

The powers that be have constructed a road along the battlefield that mostly follows the battle lines. The big monuments you can see in the picture above mark the center of the line of each group of men so you can get an idea of what kind of area they were defending. They were all built by the state or group that they represent and show a little character of the home state. They usually say "Pennsylvania 5th Regiment," or something like that, and then list battle dates, casualties, and other campaigns they were involved in. Between each of the large monuments there are often small stone markers that show where the left and right flank of each group were. Some groups held a line that was only 50 or 100 feet long, while others held several hundred yards. 

On Big Round Top

This is the view from Little Round Top, looking down into the Devil's Den. The picture doesn't really do it justice, but from the top you can see most of the battlefield and you can see why it was such an important strategic position. 

Apparently the Pennsylvanians didn't want to feel left out, so they built this 110' tall monument in the middle of the battlefield. I think it looks more like a Hare Krishna temple, personally. Our driving tour ended, naturally, at the cemetery where Lincoln his legendary speech. For whatever reason, I didn't take any pictures there, but mostly it looks like a cemetery. I thought I would feel solemn and somber in such a location, but I didn't really. Maybe it's because all of Gettysburg seems like a cemetery, and the whole place seems somber. I also decided that with all of the soldiers that died there, there's no way it isn't haunted. If you believe in that sort of thing, of course.