Gettysburg, PA

August 6, 2011

We toured the Gettysbutg battlefield on Saturday. We booked a battlefield tour and saw the Cyclorama. The painting is the second version, the one displayed originally in Boston. It has been damaged and restored many times. The visitors center that now houses it was relatively new when we were there. The painting was restored again for its new home, and a sound and light show begins your viewing of it. Besides the painting, objects are in the foreground that give the ilussion of depth not completely lost in this photo.

I purposely left the kids in the picture below to give you a sense of scale and to remind you that I wasn't really taking photos during the battle.

The guide was very knowledgeable. The park gives rigorous tests for one to qualify to be a guide. They have to know their stuff instead of just repeating a memorized spiel. Ours lived in New England and came to give tours each summer. He drove us around in our rental car and pointed out things and stopped at appropriate places along the way. Rather than giving a canned speech, he would find out the interests of those in his charge. He found out that I was from NC and Torrey came from Mississippi. From his commentary you would think almost everybody in the battle was from one of the two states. From the marker below, it appears that is not much of a stretch, since one in four Confederate soldiers who fell was from NC. I had two great-grandfathers and a great-great-grandfather in the Civil War, and perhaps other relatives. I don't know that any of them were at Gettysburg. I won't ponder my chance of being here if some ancestors had fought at Gettysburg.

Here Torrey is photographing the Mississippi monument:

The marker below shows the point of the furthest advance of North Carolina troops. I believe it is the marker back over near the tree that shows the furthest advance of Virginia troops.