It’s my most special place. I’ve been there many times. 

I can’t precisely count how many times.

(editors note: our digital media director RD, with his South Alabama heritage and Pennsylvania upbringing, has a passionate perspective on the 150th Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg)

Reverence

My earliest memory was at 8. My uncle Eugene Fortenberry was visiting us in Pennsylvania, and of course the battlefield tour was a must-see. My memory is of standing next to uncle Gene on the observation deck of the official Visitors Center, and he’s pointing out across the ‘wheatfield’.  

“You see that, boy? You see out there? Out there come the rebels, and you can hear ‘em yellin’ a hundred miles away.”

I saw ‘em. I heard ‘em. The sight, and sound, has remained with me a lifetime.

Uncle Gene knew the history of the 15^th Alabama vs. the 20^th Maine, up on Little Roundtop during that encounter. (*see the end note). Eugene Fortenberry is from Mobile, Alabama.  His kin matriculated from Bay Minette. He’s a true American hero himself, Purple Heart Marine veteran of arguably the bloodiest fights between humans since Gettysburg . . . Peleliu and Tarawa.  His widow, my dear aunt Evelyn, survives to this day in Mobile County. We had lunch last week.

Evelyn and uncle Gene’s kids are among my favorite cousins. And great friends. Evelyn has three siblings in Baldwin County and another in Citronelle. One of the sisters is my Mom. They all came from Citronelle (AL).

Growing up across South Mountain (and the famed Appalachian Trail, which traverses the spine of Blue Ridge) from Gettysburg gave us a geographical advantage, in relation to my southern cousins, to explore this most special place.  It was about 20 miles away. The Mason-Dixon line was about 10 miles away.  I grew up in what was the “deep south” of the 1863 Union, following the establishment of the Confederate Sates of America. 

As a youngster, I was enthralled with everything about it: the mini-ball holes through the buildings, the cannons and caissons, crawling through the boulder fortress of 'Devils Den'. The place has lost none of its hold on me all these years later. 

When standing on that ground, I always sensed a spiritual connection. In spite of the tragic carnage that took place there. Your feelings on those fields are of a reverence the sort of which is beyond description.

That’s where all this took place, right in the backyard of my hometown.

An estimated 4 million folks will visit this year, the 150^th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg.

Location, Location, Location

Lee saw his opportunity to sweep away the Union's Capitol, and perhaps end the conflict. By coursing up the Cumberland Valley west of that South Mountain ridge, then reverse and converge from the north, he could assault Washington D.C., Capitol of the 'Union'. A capitol named for the very General whom had won the nation's independence less than four score and twenty years earlier.

The Union was in pursuit, and knew Lee’s vast army was somewhere “out there”. Fate, and a good portion of need for shoes, led to the meeting at Gettysburg -- a little farming and college town, which also happened to be home to numerous shoe manufacturers.

The barefoot confederates were drawn in.

Memorials

As kids, we made many driving tours through the self-guided driving path (adults were driving), which winds 26 miles through this hallowed National Park. I was always fascinated.  At the time, the highways skirting the Park were crowded with tourist stops and trinket shops.

They had constructed a gaudy 300-foot “Space Needle”-type tower overlooking the battlefield, which I remember once being allowed to ascend (at an admission price which my family likely sacrificed dearly to pay, at the time).  That structure has thankfully been removed in more recent years, after decades of controversy between the various factions of preservationists and take-advantage-ists.

 [NY Times: At 5:02 this afternoon, after four minutes of delay and two countdowns, a group of Civil War re-enactors, some dressed in Confederate gray and others in Union blue, fired dummy charges toward the tower. Less than 10 seconds later, 15.5 pounds of demolition charges that had been placed on the tower exploded, collapsing the structure.

Taking down the 307-foot structure, the Gettysburg National Tower, is the first step in an effort to restore the battlefield to its appearance in 1863, Park Service officials said.

''This is sacred ground,'' the secretary of the interior, Bruce Babbitt said. ''Americans come here to learn of their past, to understand how it was in those days when we remade ourselves as a new nation.'']

My best memories are the up-close type.  By the time we were 11 or 12, my Dad—himself an American patriot and USAF veteran — would truck me and my buddies’ bikes over to the Park for a day of riding the ‘Tour’ trail, while he attended some business meeting in Gettysburg or Hanover or York. We would stop and read every plaque. And there are hundreds. We would learn all we could at every state memorial along the trail.  It was, after all, the ‘war between the states’.  The Heroism displayed from every corner of the still-young nation (at the time) captured my heart and soul.

This side-trip continued until we could drive ourselves. We’d still haul our bikes over there, instead of driving the tour route in a car. You can’t match the experience in a motorized vehicle.  The group grew to include many of my best high school friends, neighbors and strangers. My close college friend Mike Jones shares my reverence of the ‘field’. He lives in York (PA). 

Mike will often surprise me with a call, asking “Guess where I am?”

“The ‘Field'.”

“Yep. Staring right at the Alabama Memorial right now (or Mississippi, Tennessee, Maine, North Carolina, New York, etc.).”

(At last count, the Park had 1,324 monuments, 412 cannon, 148 historic buildings, 2½ observation towers, and 41 miles [66 km] of avenues, roads, and lanes.)

 Getting Personal

The cast of characters during those three days of conflict extends far beyond the famed Generals . . .  Lee, Longstreet and Pickett . . .  Meade, Hancock and Sickles. (Sickles’ bold attack on day 2 likely resulted in bloodier aftermath than Pickett’s famous charge. Later, in a political career, he forwarded the legislation which designated the battlefield as its current National Park status.)

The founder of our national pastime, Abner Doubleday, was there. He replaced the Union’s superstar General George Reynolds’ division, after Reynolds was killed on the battlefield.  Reynolds’ infantry had arrived in time to relieve Gen. John Buford’s cavalry troop which had engaged the initial Confederate approach from the west on the Chambersburg Pike. Buford died in December of that year, likely from typhoid. George Custer was there.  In fact, his cavalry cut off JEB Stuart’s attempt to get back in the battle after his reckless raiding rampage across the Pennsylvania countryside had left Lee intelligence-deprived, as to opposition troop locations. 

Cavalry General J.E.B. Stuart, in “support” of Lee’s advance, had taken on a burn-and-destroy campaign of his own, west and north of the main battleground. Growing up in Chambersburg, everyone learns that Stuart burned the town down.  Except for the Masonic Temple.  Stuart was a Mason, and spared that structure, while burning every other downtown building to the ground.  The few buildings which pre-date the ‘Civil’ War in C-burg display an historical emblem to this day.

THAT day . . .  was July 1, 1863. The battle of Gettysburg sparked off 150 years ago today, at a little crossroads just north of the Mason-Dixon line.

 (If you can visit the G-burg National Park, do so.  If not, visit a National Cemetery somewhere.)

Months later, at the dedication of the battlefield’s National Cemetery, the greatest 3 minutes of oratory in American history were delivered.

Here they are:

“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 battlefield 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 cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot 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.”

(*The 15th Alabama is most famous for being the regiment that confronted the 20th Maine on Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg on July 2, 1863. Despite several ferocious assaults, the 15th Alabama was ultimately unable to dislodge the Union troops, and was eventually forced to retreat in the face of a desperate bayonet charge led by the 20th Maine's commander, Col. Joshua L. Chamberlain.This assault was recreated in Ronald F. Maxwell's 1993 film Gettysburg.)