Battle of Gettysburg, 1883; at Gettysburg National Military Park, Pennsylvania
A gift on hallowed ground
Jewish World Review
GETTYSBURG, Pa.
In 1863, 11 major roads converged on this town. Which is why history did, too.
The founding of the American nation was the hinge of world history: Popular sovereignty would have its day. The collision of armies here was the hinge of American history: The nation would long endure. Which is why 200 or so generous private citizens recently gathered here for a quiet celebration of their gift to the nation — a sparkling new Museum and Visitor Center that instructs and inspires.
In 1997, Bob Kinsley, a contractor in York, Pa., decided that something should be done about the decrepit facilities for explaining the battle and displaying its artifacts. His determination survived more than 50 public meetings and three congressional hearings, and two years of resistance from rival bidders, some Gettysburg merchants and people who think the private sector takes up space that the public sector should fill.
He started the Gettysburg Foundation and hired Bob Wilburn, who had administered Colonial Williamsburg. Wilburn raised the $103 million that built the new center, which includes a theater for the scene-setting film narrated by Morgan Freeman, and the Cyclorama, the circular painting that depicts Pickett’s Charge on the battle’s third and final day. Americans today are so constantly pummeled by a sensory blitzkrieg — the sights and sounds of graphic journalism and entertainment — they can hardly fathom how the Cyclorama dazzled viewers when displayed in 1884. Magnificently restored and presented, it is still stunning.
The Gettysburg Foundation’s work includes recovering battle sites from urban encroachments.
It recently bought the 80-acre Spangler farm. The house, which was behind Union lines, was used as a hospital for both sides. Gen. Lewis Armistead of Virginia died there. He received his mortal wounds during Pickett’s Charge, leading the deepest penetration of Union lines on Cemetery Ridge at the spot now known as “the high-water mark of the Confederacy.”
Recently, a Gold Star mother visited Gettysburg, after driving by it often en route to visit the Arlington grave of her son, who was killed in Iraq. She was especially moved by these words from a Gettysburg newspaper published four days after the battle:
“Every name . . . is a lightning stroke to some heart, and breaks like thunder over some home, and falls a long black shadow upon some hearthstone.”
Gettysburg still stirs, but not as it used to, or should.
In “Intruder in the Dust,” William Faulkner wrote:
“For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets. . . .”
Faulkner’s sentence continued; you have just read less than half of it. To continue in his style:
Ours would be a better nation if boys and girls of all regions, and particularly the many high school and even college graduates who cannot place the Civil War in the correct half-century, could be moved, as large numbers of Americans used to be, by the names of Gettysburg battlefield sites, such as Devil’s Den, the Peach Orchard, the Wheatfield, Culp’s Hill and Little Round Top, instead of being like the visitor here who said it is amazing that so many great battles, such as Antietam and Chickamauga and Shiloh, occurred on Park Service land; and another visitor who doubted that the fighting here really was fierce because there are no bullet marks on the monuments.
Ten years ago, this column asserted that disrespect for the national patrimony of Civil War battlefields should be a hanging offense, and said:
“Given that the vast majority of Americans have never heard a shot fired in anger, the imaginative presentation of military history in a new facility here is vital, lest rising generations have no sense of the sacrifices of which they are beneficiaries.”
Today, at an embarrassing moment of multiplying public futilities, private efforts, in collaboration with the National Park Service, have done something resoundingly right that will help a normally amnesiac nation to long remember.
Wild Thing’s comment……..
As I was growing up, my Father took us on a vacation every summer. He wanted us to see America and it is something that will be with me always.
He would tell about the history of places as we went to them. When there were tours we would take those as well. Williamsburg,Arlington, the Unknown Soldier, Mount Vernon, battlefields, The Capitol, the many monuments in D.C. , the House of Representatives and the Congress, The White House, and every place across our land that had historical values to the history of our country, and even the UN had a tour we that we took. His pride in our country was contagious and his gratitude for our troops, and our Veterans of all our wars was a passion. The UN tour showed me about translators and how the massive rooms were set up to accommodate each country involved. I remember my Father telling me how wrong it was to have the UN and how it started and was something against our country and one day we would regret it even more then we did back then.
He took us to Boston, one of my favorites perhaps because it was his as well, to Boston College one of the schools he had graduated from and showed me a room with a map in it. A map so massive that one had to walk around it, like the size of a small football field. How it had cities marked with tiny lights that would first be hit in an attack on our country. Places with no names to them that were military places permitted to be known only in a general way of their location. I remember that map as though I am there right now.
The education I will always be so grateful for and when I read articles like this one memories flood my brain and heart as well.
My Father impressed on me how important our countries history was and not just to know our past but to with our future too that might help in knowing the why of things and how dangerous some things can be if allowed to happen.
I am always glad when our historical places are cared for and appreciated. It is sad to me how few care to teach their children, they rely on a teacher at school and simply that is a waste of a dream because our schools do not teach much anymore. Instead they teach sex to kindergarten age kids and condom use to gradeschool children. How to have same sex dress day and teachers taking a class to see them marry a same sex lover as a school field trip., appreciate Muslim day and their Islam and Quran. All these things ripping about our country, weakening it, raping the very history that made us great. Destroying the memories of our founding fathers and so many things. Then we ask why do people fall for an Obama so easily, how can they not, they are brain dead. They know more about rappers then Paul Revere. The go by democrats telling them how weak they are, what losers they are and how the government will ride in and save the day. They grow up believing that Republicans invented and kept alive slavery when it is the Republicans that fought for their freedom.
Instead of bus loads of people being hauled off to voting places, buses should be taken loaded with these people to places of history and teach them the truth. Few know even how our government works , few know how much and how little the Presidents power encompasses. How Congress works and what it is meant to be about, how many Senators there are they don’t even know. How there is meaning in every action done at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, what is the Pentagon and why is it built the way it is and what does it do.
Sorry for going on like this, but like I said my brain is flooding with memories and how far we have moved away from so many things as a country and pride in all these things.
….Thank you GM Cassel AMH1(AW) USN RETIRED for sending this to me.
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