Gettysburg National Military Park

• 1. Introduction

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  Gettysburg National Military Park was born from three of the bloodiest days in American history: July 1 through the 3rd of July 1863. On a stretch of Pennsylvania farmland that today covers 3,785 acres, the fate of the Civil War hung in the balance. Now the park draws nearly a million visitors a year, yet that figure represents a staggering fall from its peak. What does it mean to preserve a battlefield? Who decides which trees should stand and which should be cleared? And how do you hold together a landscape that means radically different things to different Americans? This documentary follows the ground itself, from the moment the guns fell silent to the vandals who tested it in 2024.

• 2. The Ground Itself

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  Gettysburg National Military Park sits mostly in Cumberland Township, Adams County, Pennsylvania, where it occupies almost 20% of the municipality's entire area. Portions reach into the borough limits of Gettysburg, including the Soldiers' National Cemetery. A separate exclave lies in Mount Pleasant Township. Together, these parcels hold most of the battlefield as it was fought over, plus support areas used during the fighting itself: reserve positions, supply depots, and field hospitals. The park also holds several sites associated with what came after the battle rather than the battle itself.

  Among those post-battle sites is Gettysburg National Cemetery, where Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address on the 19th of November, 1863. That speech was given less than five months after the fighting ended. The David Wills House, where Lincoln completed writing that address, was added to the park in February 2009 and is operated by the Gettysburg Foundation. Many of the park's 43,000 American Civil War artifacts are displayed in the Gettysburg Museum and Visitor Center, which the Gettysburg Foundation funded and built, opening in 2008.

• 3. Acquiring the Land

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  Federal control over Gettysburg did not happen overnight. The Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association and later veterans' groups began acquiring land for memorials and preservation as early as 1864. Federal land acquisition started on the 7th of June, 1893, when the government took nine monument tracts of 625 square feet each, a larger tenth lot of 1.2 acres, and 0.275 acres from a landowner named Samuel M. Bushman.

  Beyond straight purchases, the federal government also used eminent domain. A notable case was the taking of the Gettysburg Electric Railway right-of-ways in 1917, preceded by the landmark 1896 case United States v. Gettysburg Electric Ry. Co. Donated land added more acreage: 160 acres came from the 1959 Gettysburg Battlefield Preservation Association, and the W. Alton Jones Foundation donated another 264 acres. The park formally came under federal control on the 11th of February, 1895, when legislation titled "An Act To establish a national military park at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania" transferred the deed from the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial National Park Association to the Secretary of War. An attempt to expand the federally owned land further failed in Congress in 2010.

• 4. Restoring What Was Lost

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  Today, Gettysburg looks different than it did in 1863. The park has more wooded land now than it did when the soldiers fought there, and the National Park Service runs an ongoing program to pull back that tree cover and restore the battlefield to its historical, open conditions. Historic orchards and woodlots that once marked the landscape have disappeared and are being replanted. Native plants are also being restored to meadows and road edges, both to reconstruct the historic landscape and to support wildlife habitat.

  There are also considerably more roads and facilities than existed in the 19th century, built to accommodate tourists. The park was added to the National Register of Historic Places on the 15th of October, 1966. Ecological pressures complicate every restoration effort: natural areas including wooded stands, thickets, and wetlands have been stressed by pollution from heavy vehicle traffic, and invasive species continue to threaten the park's ecology. On the 21st of August, 2024, the National Park Service released a statement that spray paint and graffiti had damaged the War Department Observation Tower and a large rock; park staff were able to clean and restore both to their original condition.

• 5. Monuments and Memory

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  The park became one of the most symbolically charged venues in American public life long before the National Park Service took over. A centennial commemoration held on the 19th of November, 1963, exactly one hundred years after Lincoln's address, drew thousands of photographers, the U.S. Marine Band, the 3rd Infantry Regiment known as The Old Guard, and the 28th Division of the Pennsylvania National Guard under Major General Henry F. Fluck. The actor Raymond Massey, playing Lincoln, arrived by a period steam train from the 1860s and rode on horseback along the same route Lincoln and Governor Andrew G. Curtin had taken a century before. Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who lived nearby, attended alongside Governor William W. Scranton. The crowds, though large, fell short of the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 people who had gathered for the original address in 1863.

  Confederate memorials arrived later than Union ones. It was not until 1917 that a monument to General Lee was installed, marking the first time Confederate commemoration took a formal place on the grounds. Before that, the park's memorial landscape had been entirely Union-focused. One specific monument, the 72nd Pennsylvania Infantry Monument tract, gained a kind of lasting popular recognition when it appeared on the 2011 America the Beautiful Quarter dollar.

• 6. A Falling Audience

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  Attendance at Gettysburg National Military Park reached 950,000 in 2018, a figure that sounds impressive until placed alongside the historical record. That number represents a decline of 86% since 1970, when far more Americans made the trip. The trend is not unique to Gettysburg: the five major Civil War battlefield parks operated by the National Park Service, which include Antietam, Shiloh, Chickamauga/Chattanooga, and Vicksburg alongside Gettysburg, drew a combined 3.1 million visitors in 2018. That is down 70% from the 10.2 million people who visited those same five parks in 1970.

  The Gettysburg Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit that partners with the National Park Service, has poured resources into the visitor experience in part to address this long decline. Beyond funding the Museum and Visitor Center that opened in 2008, the Foundation secured funds for a cannon shop that works daily to preserve nearly 400 cannons representing actual artillery lines on the battlefield. Since 2009 alone, the Foundation has provided approximately 20 million dollars in direct support to the National Park Service, with John Latschar serving as superintendent from August 1994 through 2009 across much of that investment period.