We had planned on spending an entire day visiting various Smithsonian Museums but they were all closed due to COVID. So we looked at the weather forecast, rearranged our schedule, and decided to visit Gettysburg for our second day. It was a beautiful slightly overcast day! Not too hot and very few visitors.

Cannons are placed around Gettysburg where actual units held their positions during various skirmishes over the three days of battle. Did you know there are also over 1,300 monuments – big and small – throughout Gettysburg?

We watched Gettysburg the week before our trip in preparation for our visit. I highly recommend seeing it to get a good grasp of not only the battles but the people involved.

It’s hard to tell from the photograph above but across those fields it’s rises going up a hill. This is the view Confederate General Robert E. Lee had watching the failed attempt of Pickett’s Charge to take Cemetery Ridge.

There is a sacred, hallowed feeling as you walk the grounds of Gettysburg. It is the same feeling that occurs at other places where people have died.

At the end of the museum exhibit is a wall full of photographs of soldiers, both Confederate and Union, that died at Gettysburg. So moving to see the faces of someone’s loved one.

I really liked this quote as part of the museum exhibit at Gettysburg, “Every name . . . is a lightning stroke to some heart, and breaks like thunder over some home, and falls a long black shadow upon some hearthstone.” {Gettysburg Compiler, July 7, 1863, on the killed and wounded at Gettysburg}