Since we returned from Gettysburg late last week people have been asking me what I most enjoyed about the trip. The answer, hands down, was the excursion we made one morning to Evergreen Cemetery. I had of course been to the National Cemetery several times, but until this June I had never been to the town resting place lying adjacent to it. Now that I have, I feel I understand the town and the battle in a way I had not previously. Here are a few photos. Note that all contemporary images were taken in June 2012. A frustrating snafu on my part caused me to program the wrong year in my digital camera. The Hayfoot can attest to how frustrated I was when I discovered my error.

One would have to start with James Gettys, founder of Gettysburg.

John Burns is one of the Battle of Gettysburg’s genuine characters. A veteran of the War of 1812, the aging Burns grabbed his musket and headed toward McPherson’s Ridge when he heard the sound of the guns.

Here he is looking west toward the Chambersburg Pike.

The battle becomes more immediate when one sees the headstones of individuals whose names gave their designations to some of the battle’s most important events. There is no substitute for getting out and seeing where history was made.

Above is another example.

Many of the families are still very much a part of the community. There were numerous plots of easily recognizable family names considerably more recent than these.

The Evergreen Cemetery Gateway

Gettin’ our sesquicentennial on…

(Hat tip Darrow Wood)

These fields can never be
simply themselves. Their green
seems such a tender green,
their contours so significant
to the tourists who stare

towards the far range of mountains
as if they are listening
to the page of history tearing
or to what they know themselves of warfare
between brothers. In this scenery

cows and cannons stand side by side
and motionless, as if they had grown here.
The cannons on their simple wheels
resemble farm carts, children
climb them. Thus function disappears almost entirely

into form, and what is left under
the impartial blue of the sky is a landscape
where dandelions lie in the tall grass
like so many spent cartridges, turning
at last to the smoke

of puffballs; where the only red
visible comes at sunset;
where the earth has grown so lovely
it seems to forgive us even as we are learning
to forgive ourselves.

–Linda Pastan, Heroes in Disguise: Poems

Seminary Ridge

David Pearson, 83rd New York

Unfortunately the photo is somewhat small because my cellphone camera was all I had, but I was in Green-Wood Cemetery earlier this afternoon and came across the headstone of Corporal David Pearson of the 83rd New York Volunteers. The 83rd was part of the First Corps and fought in Zeigler’s Grove on July 2 & 3, where Pearson became a prisoner of war. A quick search on Fold3 says that Pearson enlisted on May 27, 1861 and was mustered out on June 23, 1864. It is sometimes lost on us how well into the 20th century many Civil War veterans lived. Pearson applied for a pension on Novemeber 24, 1900 and lived until 1914. This headstone is one of the thousands laid in the past decade by Green-Wood Cemetery to mark the nearly 4,000 Civil War soldiers buried there. Here is the headstone next to the Pearson family monument.

Pearson family headstone