Morning sunrise shrouds the image of the Mississippi monument to be found on the Gettysburg battlefield. (Press Pros Feature Photos)
There are no more beautiful examples of the men (and women) who’ve sacrificed everything than that which you can find in our American Civil War battlefield parks. All you have to do is take the time to stop, look, and consider their story.
For years when our kids were small Mindy and I would spend vacation time by visiting the most accessible national battlefield parks of the Civil War – Gettysburg, Antietam, Chattanooga, Manassas, etc.
It was the perfect blend of scenery, history, and just enough gore to keep the average ten-year-old imagination fascinated. And it still is, even for a seven-times-ten-year-old like me.
The parks harkened to my ancestry, primarily, my maternal grandmother who made it a habit on Memorial Day to adorn the Civil War veterans’ graves at the local cemetery with fresh-cut flowers from her garden.
Hell, today most people know nothing about the Civil War, and many who do are ashamed of it – that it was all about the abolition of slavery. And without question, an element of the conflict that Lincoln used to the Union’s advantage with the Emancipation Proclamation on New Year’s Day, 1863.
But the truth is, that many people in the South had other issues, and many of the same issues with the federal government still exist today. They’d had enough and turned to states’ rights as an untried alternative while never thinking that there might be an outside threat someday that a place like Arkansas would be totally defenseless against. Hence, we fought the Civil War.
The iconic landscape of the Maryland countryside, scene of the Battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862.
And out of them all those military battle parks, there are none more fascinating, and accessible, than that of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, or the exit in eastern Maryland, off I-70, that leads you to Sharpsburg, and the Antietam battlefield. And even after my kids grew up, and moved on, I’ve continued to go to these places despite my wife rolling her eyes and sharing how much more I would appreciate something new and different…like the Louvre, in Paris, or the Notre Dame Cathedral.
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Comparatively, you can spent a great weekend in Gettysburg – trip, food, and lodging – for a $1,000. A trip to Paris, conservatively, is twenty times that and you can’t speak the language. I choose to stay in my lane, and out of eight-hour flights across the Atlantic on germ-infested jets.
Several years ago I hooked up with the University of Nebraska Press, in Lincoln, as the photo editor of Gettysburg Magazine, a scholarly study of the three days fighting at Gettysburg whose editor at the time asked if I could create unique cover photos for the publication that exhibited the ‘ambient’ beauty of the park?
And by natural light what he meant was no photo editing that augmented the color, or added things that weren’t there for the naked eye to see. What he wanted, he added, was to capture what others missed , and could see if they just took the time. “Vision”, he called it, and the knowledge to know where to look – the secrets of Gettysburg.
Morning scene along Confederate Avenue, Battle of Gettysburg, July 1,2,and 3, 18
And if you know the history of Gettysburg there’s literally thousands of such examples that you can illustrate through photography, because there were nearly 150,000 soldiers engaged (North and South), and a third of them…casualties of the fighting.
Of course, had there been no battle at Gettysburg in the first place the landscape would be no less enchanting. Adams County, Pennsylvania is one of America’s prettiest rural landscapes imaginable, and just seventy miles west of the Pennsylvania Amish communities in Lancaster County.
In addition, the rolling hills and elevations of the northern-most reaches of the Blue Ridge Mountains are the home of orchard country, where the best apples and peaches in America are grown. Georgia might be the ‘peach’ state, but the best peaches are grown at elevation, above the frost line, in Pennsylvania.
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Of course, for the sake of the 4th of July, and the national celebration of the freedoms Americans enjoy like no other culture of people on earth, it’s the reality of our national battlefield parks that make you stop and pay tribute, considering the unimaginable atrocities of those wars fought during a time of crude armaments and an almost-absence of medical advancement that we know it today. Many are the photos of battlefield hospitals where piles of amputated arms and legs accumulated for the sake of expediency of treatment…and lack of a better-known option.
Peaches on the site of the Sherfy Farm, alongside Emmittsburg Pike, scene of heavy fighting on the Gettysburg battlefield.
The national cemeteries are another call for reflection, as thousands of soldiers who never made it home were, for lack of proper identification and transport, simply buried on the site of their sacrifice. And there are none more poignant than that of Gettysburg and Antietam, where local citizens at the time took care to honor the dead in the best tradition of historical respect.
And, of course, you must be impressed by the preservation effort to maintain these landscapes in their traditional context, now more than 160 years after the fact. The monuments, erected as early as 1895, when Congress officially declared the battlefields to be held in hallowed respect for all time, are literally works of art, and in most cases, perfectly capturing the features of the soldiers they honor. the bronze figures atop the marble pedestals a perfect likeness.
In recent times partisan political pressure has led to the removal of many of the Confederate symbols of that war, but it’s still history, nonetheless. And, it’s our history!
If a picture is worth a thousand words…looking west at sunset towards South Mountain from Little Round Top, on the Gettysburg battlefield.
Some of my best moments can be attributed to the knowledge and the respect I’ve grown to enjoy from the time I’ve spent at these places. And again, from a photographer’s viewpoint, they never look the same because the natural light under which you see them is never the same. Roll your eyes if you want, but every day spent at Gettysburg is as it was the first time I saw it.
For example, the photo (to the right) is an image that I’ve walked by (even photographed) hundreds of times over the past forty years. At sunset the sky is typically the golden color of the setting sun dropping behind South Mountain in the distance. But on this particular winter evening nature painted with a different palette…with the pinks and the blues. Made a decade ago, I’d never seen it before – never seen it since.
And if you’re wondering. Given their choice of places to visit and experience, my kids, Matt and Laynie, still prefer a trip to Gettysburg – still appreciate the history, the people and the sacrifice, that’s made it all possible.
May it have the same impact on you someday soon. Happy Fourth of July!
Logan Services, in Dayton, Cincinnati, and Columbus, extends its wishes to you for a happy and safe 4th of July holiday.