Fodor's Travel Talk Forums - Trip Report Father/Son Trip to the Heart of American History: Philadelphia & Gettysburg

Thanks tdmore and LaurenKahn1. Sorry this report has been episodic, but I haven't had time until now to finish it.

AFTERNOON & EARLY EVENING: Battle of Gettysburg – 2nd and 3rd Day Sites (cont’d)

By the time we were finished at the Visitor Center, it was pushing 3 p.m. so we abandoned out plans to hike the second and third day battle sites. We left the Visitor Center in our rent car and drove north back in to town on Washington Street, then took a left on West Middle Street back up Seminary Ridge to the Lutheran Theological Seminary that gives the ridge its name. The Seminary, ironically, was in the thick of the fighting on the first day when it served as a field hospital, then was behind Confederate lines for the remainder of the battle. We drove south on West Confederate Avenue along Seminary Ridge, paralleling the Confederate lines for the second and third days of the battle. We stopped at the Virginia memorial and the Robert E. Lee monument where the general reportedly consoled the distraught survivors of Pickett’s Charge on the third day. Looking across the open fields to the small “Clump of Trees” that marked the center of the Union lines, we were amazed at the unprotected distance the soldiers in that charge had to cross directly into the face of massive Union rifle and cannon fire.

We moved on to the fascinating natural features at the southern end of the park -- walking along the crest of Little Round Top (hill) with its dramatic panorama of the lower half of the battlefield, climbing the boulders in the Devil’s Den, and crossing the Wheatfield and the Peach Orchard that on July 2, 1863 were covered with dead and wounded men from both sides. It was in these locations that the most intense fighting raged on that second day, and the area was particularly meaningful for us because it is where my great-great-great grandfather’s unit fought during the battle.

We detoured east to Culp’s Hill at the other end of the Union line where a separate battle raged at the end of the second day, then finished our tour of Gettysburg on the Union side of the “Clump of Trees” that bore the brunt of Pickett’s Charge on the third and final day of the battle. Twilight was beginning to fall as we walked the fields out to Emmitsburg Road, then did an about-face and walked directly back towards the Union lines, covering about one-third of the same ground the Confederates had to cross in their futile charge on that final day. Thunder rumbled in the distance and drops of rain began to fall, adding a melancholy feel to the scene. Pickett’s Charge seemed to herald a particularly terrible era of warfare, where battle tactics were mired in the 19th Century but weaponry was rapidly advancing on the cusp of the 20th Century, and which would culminate in the suicidal charges that killed millions of men in World War I. We found it difficult to fathom the courage the men who fought here had to muster on that fateful July day.

This was a somber end to a great father-son trip. As we left the battlefield and before we headed back to Philadelphia, we stopped to get a quick drink just a short distance from where Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address, just four months after the battle. It took Lincoln to put this sacrifice in proper perspective for us: “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.”