Commentary
I’d always wanted to visit
Gettysburg Battlefield and look across the peaceful pastoral landscape that once echoed with the thunder of war. I wanted to walk
Seminary Ridge, peer around the rocks at
Devil’s Den, and stand on
Little Round Top. I wanted to stand where Abraham Lincoln stood when he gave the
Gettysburg Address that my dear mother could recite until the day she died. I wanted to see how far north that famous Virginian, Gen. Lee, had come before his army withdrew to the Potomac.
And so I took a trip—seemingly on a whim, but planned for a lifetime.
The day I arrived in Gettysburg was one of record-setting heat. My heart leaped with excitement as I got out of the car and gazed in silence at my first view of the battlefield. I stared at the statues and the rolling green hills and listened to the quiet murmur of bees. It was good to finally be there, but I slowly began to feel quite strange.
It occurred to me that I had never before visited a place of violence where so many people had been killed or wounded in one
sudden manmade cataclysm. To me, it seemed as if the air itself still vibrated with the moans of the dying, and the green grass betrayed the blood that must still sift dryly through the dirt just beneath my feet. Here, I realized, I was finally understanding the words “hallowed ground.”
Still wanting to absorb the significance of the place, I donned my sunglasses and hat and scurried to the open-air top of the famous double-decker
Gettysburg Battlefield Tours bus. I was thrilled to be given a little earpiece to plug into the dashboard in front of my seat so I could listen to the tour guide with no distractions.
After an hour of willingly being nearly baked alive just to take in the view, I was relieved when we stopped for cold drinks. Refreshed, we loaded up again and took a ride through the town where the guide pointed out historic buildings that still bore the marks of war.
Toward the end of tour, while the bus was stopped, the guide was describing how the soldiers had marched up the hill before an assault. As he called our attention to the hill, we sat in confused silence as about a hundred soldiers in uniform were walking up the hill toward us, taking the exact route he was describing. I have no idea why none of us asked what was happening, but we didn’t. We sat there with our mouths open and beads of sweat stinging our eyes. As the bus started up again, a few of us gave each other that “What just happened?” look. I’m sure it was nothing more than a strange coincidence and that they, too, were visitors to the battlefield that day, but it was the eeriest memory of my visit.
After the battlefield tour, I walked nearby streets and met the fascinating people who live there. You can’t go to Gettysburg without checking out
Casteel Sculptures right across from the battlefield on Baltimore Street. Gary Casteel is a colorful older gentleman with an illustrious career of sculpting and painting. In his Gettysburg storefront, you can buy replicas of his own sculptures or paintings, or one of the many battlefield monument replicas he’s created. His most well-known work is the equestrian monument honoring
Gen. James Longstreet at Gettysburg National Military Park.
Gary is a downhome kind of guy from the coal mining hills of West Virginia, and an expert on the battlefield as it stands now, and the battle as it happened then.
I was blessed to have a long visit with Casteel that scorching day, and it was a memory I cherish. Until I met him, I hadn’t realized that there wasn’t a National Civil War Memorial. Casteel will tell anyone who will listen about his extensive plans for a
National Civil War Memorial and the 25 years he’s spent designing the monuments and laying the groundwork for it. Now in his 70s, it’s likely he won’t see his work come to fruition in the current climate that seems to seek the destruction of America’s past. In 2019, an
article outlined how Taneytown, Maryland, was interested in building the memorial, but that plans were in jeopardy due to “people who now find anything involving the confederacy offensive and want to erase that and other historical facts about the Civil War from the public square.”
Of course, that doesn’t seem financially sound when you consider that Gettysburg Battlefield receives between
1 million and 2 million visitors per year. Despite the onslaught of
removing or renaming Confederate monuments, there hasn’t been a dent in the tourists coming to Gettysburg, which proves there’s still a thirst for learning American history and a desire to teach it to our children.
It was the Civil War that gave us the “
Decoration Day” that would
officially become “Memorial Day” in 1967. There are many stories to do with its origin, but most agree it began about three years after the end of the Civil War with annual visits to lay flowers at the graves of recent war dead.
Despite “Memorial Day” parades, my parents said that when they were young, most people still referred to it as “Decoration Day.” My mother remembered it as a fun day with extended family. Everyone would pack up their picnic baskets and head to the cemetery to visit their dead and decorate graves; the old folks would sit around eating and reminiscing about the old days while the children would laugh and play.
Today, picnicking is no longer allowed in most cemeteries, and almost no one pulls out a lawn chair or spreads a blanket to relax near the graves of deceased family. And it’s kind of too bad, because it seems like a rather healthy integration of life and death.
Despite the changes, my parents began taking me to the same cemetery when I was a child. They would tell me stories about the family who had gone before me until I felt like I had known them all. The family plots of both sides of my family lie in that same little rural cemetery with the cast iron gates and the towering pine trees. Throughout our lifelong visits there, it was always a happy place to me; until the days came when my parents went there to stay, and I was left alone to tell their stories.
My father, the World War II veteran, who was so eager to join the fight like his big brother, but was so young that he only got in on the tail end of the war. After all, his brother had parachuted in behind the lines at Normandy then fought his way through the Battle of the Bulge.
And my dear mother, who had a love for everything historical, especially the Civil War. She never got to see Gettysburg or Antietam like I did, but her rousing recitation of the Gettysburg Address would leave you in tears; and long before the advent of the internet, she knew the words to every Civil War song from
“Tenting Tonight“ to ”
Eatin’ Goober Peas.”
May Memorial Day be a day for all of us to happily pay homage to those we’ve loved and lost, those we weren’t lucky enough to know, and especially those who died preserving our freedom. Let us once again tell their stories as we “resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
