The Monuments of Gettysburg

monIn 2002 my brother Jack, our sons, and I began tracking down each of the monuments on the Gettysburg battlefield.  We'd been interested in the battle for years, but had never paid much attention to the many monuments and markers.   In the course of the search, we felt that we had re-discovered the battlefield.

We began with Kathy Georg Harrison's The Location of the Monuments, Markers, and Tablets on Gettysburg Battlefield (Thomas Publications, 1993), and Gettysburg: The Complete Pictorial of Battlefield Monuments by D. Scott Hartwig and Ann Marie Hartwig (Thomas Publications, 1995).  We supplemented these excellent books with the Trailhead Graphics Map of the Gettysburg National Military Park (2000) that lists the locations of the monuments.  As we compared these lists, and then went out into the field to find the monuments, we discovered minor inaccuracies and omissions in all of them, as well as several monuments that have been added since the publication dates.

Why do this?  The monuments themselves are often interesting works of art, and reading each monument has developed our historical sense of the battle.  Some monuments are interesting because they use elaborate rhetoric to disguise the fact that the  regiment fought poorly.  Finally, to some extent, it's a scavenger hunt.  To find some of the monuments we've had to hike though dense, tick-infested, poison-ivy-covered forests to get to a monument to a regiment that basically did very little.

How many are there?  Both Harrison and Hartwig cite the number 1320, but neither of their works actually list that many separate monuments (presumably that number includes flank markers).  To some extent it depends on how you define "monument."  If you define it too broadly, General Pickett's Buffet and Paddy O'Rourke's bar could be seen as monuments.  Our definition is constantly evolving, but essentially we see a monument as a tribute to the battle, normally made of stone or metal, that was erected by either the veterans or the National Park Service.  Following Harrison, we have  included several rock carvings that commemorate a particular regiment or soldier (but not the graffiti carvings of civilians).  Although we are counting flank markers,  we decided not to count stones or markers that are part of a monument though physically separate (e.g. the border stones surrounding the North Carolina monument), as long as they were present when the monument was dedicated.  Although it's listed in Harrison, we decided not to include the monument to the WWI Tank Corps since it does not relate to the Civil War battle.  Nor did we include the statue of Lincoln and the tourist that is located on the town square.  Our list presently has 914 separate monuments, markers, or commemorative stones.  This figure does not include the 428 flank markers; thus our current total is 1342.

Our complete list (last updated June 2007) can be accessed as a Word file.  The file has the following categories:

  • Name of monument
  • Location by battlefield avenue
  • GPS coordinates (if available)
  • Notes
  • Trailhead Graphics number
  • Harrison book page number

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