A house is just a house and a building just a building—until something weighty happens there. In November 1863, Abraham Lincoln was the guest of attorney David Wills. The 16th president’s visit to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, his overnight stay at Wills’s house, and the words he spoke to crowds gathered at a new cemetery on Nov. 19 left an indelible impression that continues to fascinate visitors today.
Pennsylvania native David Wills would undoubtedly be surprised to know that his home, located on the town’s Lincoln Square, is now part of the National Park Service’s Gettysburg National Military Park. The house was renovated and opened to the public on Feb. 12, 2009, the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birthday. The three-story house-museum has artifacts from the Battle of Gettysburg on display, as well as letters written by soldiers’ family members to Wills.
Torn Apart by War
Before July 1863, Gettysburg was a relatively quiet community. But after a little more than 3,000 Union and close to 4,000 Confederate soldiers were killed during three days of fighting in the fields, pastures, and streets of the town, Wills began working on establishing a cemetery. Created at the behest of then-governor Andrew Curtin, it memorialized the slain soldiers.Although Wills had managed his own law practice in Gettysburg for 10 years, he focused on the task of creating a cemetery. He purchased the land, hired a designer, and began accepting bids for the reinterment of many soldiers from temporary graves.
While the 32-year-old Wills reached out to dignitaries and poets to speak at the Nov. 19, 1863, cemetery opening, only the politician and noteworthy public speaker Edward Everett agreed to provide the main speech. However, Wills also appealed to war-weary Lincoln. Would he attend and provide commentary after Everett’s speech?
In a Nov. 2, 1863 letter, Wills asked if Lincoln could give “a few appropriate remarks.” The letter wasn’t a formal invitation, but a communication “authorized by the governors of the different states … to participate in these ceremonies.”
Wills expressed in the letter to the president: “It is the desire, after the Oration, you, as Chief Executive of the Nation, formally set apart these grounds.”
Wills ended the letter with a plea: “We hope you will be able to be present to perform this last solemn act to the solders dead on this battlefield.”
The rest is history.
The Visitor Experience
Visitors to Wills’s home can see the bedroom where Lincoln slept on Nov. 18, 1862 and most likely penned finishing touches to his poignant, patriotic Gettysburg Address. They can also see Wills’s office where he spent the latter part of 1863 planning the cemetery.Lincoln enjoyed dinner at this home on Nov. 18 with a few of Wills’s other guests. After the townspeople learned he was staying there, they gathered by the front door that same evening, and Lincoln said a few words to them before retiring.
Additionally, it was on the sidewalk in front of this now-famous house that people began assembling by 10 a.m. on Nov. 19 to proceed to what was then referred to as the Soldiers’ National Cemetery (now Gettysburg National Cemetery), one mile away. There, Everett spoke for two hours and Lincoln spoke for two minutes.
Perhaps it was Wills’s letter that inspired Lincoln’s most famous speech, since some of the lines loosely mirror the attorney’s ardent request. For example, part of his speech affirmed: “We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.”
After sharing only 272 words to a reported 15,000 people, Lincoln returned to Wills’s home for lunch before boarding a train bound back to Washington. The president had only been in Gettysburg for about 24 hours, but his presence there forever marked the town, the cemetery, and Wills’s house as historic American locales.
Following that momentous November day, Wills continued to work on the cemetery, where around 3,500 Battle of Gettysburg soldiers are buried. He soon resumed his work as an attorney. He and his wife raised seven children there, and Wills died in the home in 1894.
For 161 years, people have visited Gettysburg’s battlefields, walking over the historically significant sites like Culp’s Hill and Little Round Top. However, many visitors have little to no knowledge of the David Wills Home, about a mile from where the main fighting occurred in July 1863. Yet, it’s at this residential site that one of America’s most famous presidents transformed history with the words he penned and pondered there.
