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In 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.
Note (August 4, 2008): I am no longer
updating my list. I believe that the National Park Service has
ruined the battlefield by destroying 500+ acres of trees so that the
imaginatively challenged can picture the battlefield as it was in
1863 (of course, following their logic, the vandals at the NPS
should blow up the monuments as well). Gettysburg has been a
part of my life since I was a child, but I am no longer interested
in going to see the latest desecrations (see the picture above).
If you still find Gettysburg worthwhile, you may download my list
here.
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