Gettysburg

Jere posting: Spending 4 hours at Gettysburg, and trying to take it all in is like trying to take a drink from a fire hydrant. I am not sure how long it would take to get a reasonably complete picture of all that transpired there July 1-3, 1863. One thing is for sure, the monument business must have been great there over the last 150 years. There are monuments, plaques and statues commemorating everything from entire state militias to marking the point where individual soldiers fell. In many places, far off the road or beaten paths, there are statues standing in the woods, or among the rocks where some portion of the battle is remembered. We tried to study the dynamics, to picture the battle, but all we managed was a broad overview interspersed with a small portion of the many stories from the battlefield. The level to which different story lines have been researched is phenomenal. There were people there with large notebooks representing what appeared to be a lifetime of research on just certain aspects of the battle. I think I understand the fascination with Gettysburg, and with the Civil War a little better now. It is rather compelling to think about why it happened, what it means, and how it changed us.