A Monumental Small Town

We have just come from Washington DC, a very large city, with numerous monuments and statues strewn throughout its environs. They seemed to be everywhere, but in fact there can be a good mile or two between some of these special places.

Not so for Gettysburg. In a rectangular area of 3 by 5 miles, there are over 1,400 monuments, statues, and plaques.

This little town was the spot where two armies met and had a small disagreement. The resolving of this argument left about 51,000 men dead or wounded – all of them around or within the town that only had a population of 2,500.

The town is larger now, thanks to a bustling tourist industry. It has roads specially designed to carry cars and buses in a pattern built to display the most number of monuments in the most efficient manner and still not disturb the townspeople’s lives.

Most people drive or take a tour bus, but because the area of interest is small, there are other ways of getting around to see everything. There are bicycle tours, horseback tours, and segway tours. I would even suggest walking except that there are no sidewalks outside of town. Besides, you do enough trudging over fields and rocks to get to some of the statues that you really don’t need the extra exercise.

The statues are in places depicting where certain generals or other important people died or did an act worthy of noting.  Since battles do not stay nicely on the clean roads and paved drives, you sometimes find these works of art in remote areas, like right in the middle of fields or hidden in the woods. 

Monuments and plaques are put where a regiment held its ground, with smaller stones on either side showing the right and left flanks or the rear. Really, you can literally trip over them, there are so many.

And then there are the cenotaphs, often huge monuments to the soldiers of each state. These can be graphic or whimsical, ornate or simple.

Interpretive signs will detail for you all the tactical strategies that the officers used as the battle raged. And also any errors in those strategies, and failures that occurred due to mistakes made. In short, far more than I had ever wanted to know about war.

It is admirable that the government has kept most of the battlefield out of private hands, and with buildings and fences just as they were during the battle in 1863. It gives you an idea of what obstacles the infantry and cavalry faced during advances, charges, and retreats.

They have also set up the cannons where they would have stood during battle, aimed out over the fields and hills.

The only thing “new” is the cemetery. It was created a few months later, to give the Union soldiers a proper place to be buried. The poor Confederates were shipped home or buried in a group. 

But even the “winning” team had so many unidentified dead, that most of the stones in the cemetery just have the word “Unknown” on it, or sometimes only a number.

Ok, we all know the words, so let’s sing it together:

 

War, huh,

Good God, y’all

What is it good for?

Absolutely nothin’……

W