Highlights:
Battlefield sites **********
New Visitor's Center/museum **********
Shriver House tour *******
Gettysburg, PA
Sept. 8 & 9, 2008
300 miles and 8 hours from our last stop
Bob & Jenny's Cross Country Adventure
Day 24 & 25
Welcome to
What's next? Washington D.C.
The Shriver House
A tour through this home unravels the story of how the war affected the civilians in this town. With her husband away in the military, Mrs. Shriver and her daughters escaped to a nearby home when the battle began. Confederate soldiers punched holes in the attic walls and carried out sniper shots. DNA evidence showed two of them died in the attic. When the fighting was over, the town became a huge makeshift hospital for the 40,000 casualties--about 20 times their population.
Mr. Shriver came home for four days at Christmas two years later but went back to fight and ended up dying as a prisoner shortly after. Her daughters both died of tuberculosis before they were 18 (a disease that was common after the unsanitary conditions of war).
Remember learning Lincoln's Gettysburg address? "Four score and seven years ago"..... President Lincoln walked through the streets of Gettysburg past the Shriver house (left photo) and gave his infamous speech at the dedication of the Soldier's National Cemetery here.
The Gettysburg National Park battlefields cover 10 square miles. We rode our bikes through the park, stopping to read the memorials and learn about the various battles that took place over the three-day battle. To stand in the exact fields where thousands of men charged each other, where 11,000 men died and 40,000 more were wounded--in just a few days--really drums the reality of how horrible this war was.
A new amazing Visitors Center has opened here. It is probably the best museum we have seen. Artifacts and displays fill each room in a progression on the timeline of the civil war. You can get a good understanding of President Lincoln's role in keeping the nation unified and using the war as a means to end slavery, and of General Robert E. Lee's life as a hero to both Virginia and the Union, but then as an enemy as he chose allegiance to Virginia and led the Confederates in many successful battles prior to his loss at Gettysburg. Yet, his statue stands in the Library of Congress. --I find that amazing that the surrendered Confederate officers went on to become governors of southern states and professors at colleges. After all that bloodshed? Only in America!!!
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is recounted on this memorial--the only memorial known to be dedicated to a speech (not a person).
Did you know?
Lincoln saw Gettysburg as an opportunity early in the Civil War to not only help survivors understand why loved ones died but particularly to rally people to continue the fight for freedom.
Battlefield sites. You can drive or bike through the fields where the battle took place. They looked much like they did in 1863 (minus some cornstalks!)
Soldier's National Cemetery. After the battle, the bodies were quickly put under earth, only to be dug up and properly buried months later in the newly designed cemetery. The graves are lined up in concentric rings so that no State is shown preference in location. Graves from each of the States involved in the battle are grouped and are marked with a stone bearing the number of losses sustained (photo above); however, these totals are for just the "known" soldiers. Half of the buried were unknown soldiers and they lay in a separate area of the cemetery. 11,000 men died. Sadly, but understandably, the Confederate soldiers lay buried in fields surrounding the cemetery for years until they were transferred South.
President Lincoln's
Gettysburg Address
1863
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought
forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived
in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that
"all men are created equal"
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing
whether that nation, or any nation so conceived,
and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met
on a great battle field of that war. We have
come to dedicate a portion ot it, as a final rest-
ing place for those who died here, that the nation
might live. This we may, in all propriety do. But, in a
larger sense, we can not dedicate- we can not
consecrate- we can not hallow this ground-
The brave men, living and dead, who struggled
here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power
to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long
remember what we say here; while it can never
forget what they did here.
It is rather for us, the living, to be here dedicated
to the great task remaining before us-
that, from these honored dead we take in-
creased devotion to that cause for which
they here, gave the last full measure of devotion-
that we here highly resolve these
dead shall not have died in vain, that
the nation, shall have a new birth of free-
dom, and that government of the people by
the people for the people shall not perish
from the earth."
