Gettysburg

Our trek across Pennsylvania, wouldn't have been complete without a stop in Gettysburg.  What hallowed ground.  It is really quite moving to be there, look across the battlefields, see the monuments that honor the soldiers, and recognize the significance of the sacrifices that took place on the very ground you are standing on.



Gettysburg Address


After a stop at the Visitor Center and the gift shop.  We headed out to take a driving tour of the battlefields.  We used a cd that included a dramatized tour.  Usually, you buy the cd at the gift shop, but we had friends who did the same tour last year and let us borrow their cd--nice.  The cd was great, it would tell you where to drive and then tell you stop while a dramatized account was given of the events that took place at the particular place you were at.  It really helped to bring the Battle of Gettysburg alive.



Across the battlefields




Across the battlefields

 The following two pictures are of a boulder-strewn area known as the Devil's Den.  The pictures are taken from Little Round Top.  It is on this terrain that some of the fiercest fighting took place.  The Union Army was able to gain the advantageous high ground during this battle but at the end of the fighting many men, wounded and dying, lay across this treacherous landscape.

Dave and Ashley in front of the Eternal Light Peace Memorial

It's quite something to contemplate the significance of the battle that took place in this small town.  The historical materials say that the Governor of the state of Pennsylvania was so distraught over the number of dead that needed to be buried after the fight was over and the troops moved on that he purchased the land to establish a memorial and cemetery.

We learned so much here.
Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln, 1863
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on 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 of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

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 consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.



On a lighter note, we also learned that the number one place in America for paranormal research is...Gettysburg.