Gettysburg National Military Park

I planned this trip so we could visit Gettysburg. I had been here in my early teens with my parents and never forgot it. I wanted Bud to see it. Most of it is acres and acres around the town, preserved with the fences, cleared fields and woods as they were then and dotted with monuments.

There is a Visitors Center with many of the thousands of artifacts found after the battle.

I preferred the musical instruments…

to the buttons…

or the guns.

We put Matey in the stroller and walked out to see the area closest to the Visitor Center.

This is the first monument I read, to Companies E and I of the 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry. What struck me was the last line of the inscription. “Erected by the survivors of the regiment.”

This is the view from Cemetery Ridge, where the Union troops were arrayed. On the third and final day of this bloodiest battle of the Civil War 12,000 Confederate soldiers under Pickett charged from their position on Seminary Ridge. The Union lines held and Lee was thwarted in his attempt to bring the war north of the Mason-Dixon Line. It was moving and sad to stand in these places and think of the thousands who died here.

We then took the auto tour. We drove through miles of beautiful countryside dotted with monuments to the fighters and the fallen.

There were hundreds of monuments, large…

and small.

70,000 Confederate soldiers fought 93,000 Union soldiers on these fields and woods. 51,000 of them were killed, injured or captured.

This inscription was typical. The units memorialized fought many battles. It is staggering to think of the harm we inflicted on each other during this awful war.

I will leave you with this image, the Eternal Peace Memorial. Seventy-five years after the end of the war, 1,800 Civil War veterans helped dedicate this memorial to “Peace Eternal in a Nation United”.

May it stay that way.