Gettysburg National Military Park

After visiting Antietam we assumed that this Military Park would be the same but we were wrong. For one reason, the park is huge and best seen via air conditioned car and even then it can take several hours to see it all.  For the more adventurous ones you can visit on horseback.  The campground where we stayed had daily tours into the park but with the high temperatures Jim & I decided to pass it up.


During one of our stops to photograph some monuments we met a young guy who seemed particularly interested in one monument and I waited for him to move on before I took any photos.  It turned out that he was the great-grandson of the person being honored by the monument and he shared lots of stories about it and the surrounding battles that took place near the monument.

He even showed us a rocky area behind a monument where the soldiers had carved the date and their names in the rocks. The carvings were well worn but he suggested we pour some water over them to make them a bit clearer.

Unfortunately, that didn’t help much.

He also showed us the only tree in the entire park that was there during the battles.  It and another one located in the town of Gettysburg are called the “Witness trees” because of what they've “seen”.  The one in town is next to an ice cream shop that Jim & I visited several times during our stay.