Touring Gettysburg
Saturday, August 12th, 2006Poor Bethany…little did she know she married an early bird. I’m not always an early bird, just when I’m on vacation. She’s the opposite. She gets up before me on normal days and sleeps in on vacation. So here I am, awake and writing….
Gettysburg was very humbling. It was very eerie being on the battlefield where 130,000 men fought for 3 days, resulting in 50,000 casualties. Even more humbling was seeing statues from every state in both the north and south who fought that week in 1863. Most interesting to me was the 1st Minnesota Volunteer Infantry’s monument, whose members suffered an 82% mortality rate in a single battle, a record for any surviving (not completely killed) United States military unit.
The historical society here has done a wonderful job in recreating the battle from every vantage point. Upright cannons mark the spots where major generals commanded from, cannons mark where artillery was located, statues with round and square bottoms (confederate and union) mark where infantry regiments were, and all of these monuments have plaques with descriptive documentation about each unit’s role in the battle.
When you stop at the Museum of the Civil War in downtown Gettysburg, you can purchase an Audio tape/CD tour which you play in your car as you roam around. If you stop at a lot of the monuments as we did, it takes about 5 hours to complete the whole tour. On the tour, you get to relive the battle from July 1st to July 3rd, standing with the artilery, defending little and big round top, sniping at little round top soldiers from below, and watching Pickett’s Charge from the Union lines.
The interior of the Battlefield is largely open to the public, but you hardly feel like walking across it when you realize that 7-8000 soldiers died on one charge alone.
After 5 hours of touring, we stopped off in Gettysburg for some food and hydration. There are lots of nice little Cafe’s along US 15, where you can relax and get out of the summer sun for a bit. The place we stopped at even had home-made lemonade. Yum!