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Where is Gainesville?

1st cuzzin of mine restored that log cabin

You need to take a hour ride west to Lexington take rt 60 come thru gods country👍

Kirk,

Good to hear you're touring other parts of the USA!

Have "done" Gettysburg twice, the first during a day in the early 1990s, when we happened to be in Pennsylvania with Eileen's relatives, including her stepfather-in-law who grow up in that area. The second on a guided 2-day tour a few years later, which we specifically scheduled on another "East coast" trip. Have also toured some other Civil War battlefields, including Antietam (which as others have mention is also fascinating), along several others, mostly in Georgia but also other locations.

But have also "happened" across other areas where the evidence remains. One was on the 800-acre "farm" which Melvin Forbes and some of his friends owned in West Virginia--where there were short stone walls in the middle of the thick woods--with rifle ports, made during the fringes of the Battle of the Wilderness....

Let's compare notes when you come back to get more horseradish.

John

Great! I have learned a lot. This has been the most enlightening trip and beautiful scenery. The whole drive from Maryland, to Pennsylvania and into Virginia has been spectacular. I have other places yet to go, but the trip has beyond belief and still have 3 days to discover more…

Re: The Gettysburg Museum I found this display particularly moving…

Hundreds of the photographs of young men on both sides who died in that battle.

Peg leg Dick Ewell cost us Gettysburg 🤬

My childhood family home sits on a low ridge a couple miles north of Williamsport, MD, close to where Broadfording Road crosses the Conococheague Creek. When Lee was bottled up at Williamsport on his retreat from G'burg (the Potomac River was in flood stage - remember it rained like hell for a few days after July 3), he ordered a string of rifle pits be set up as a picket line on that ridge because it commands the approaches into Williamsport via the Greencastle-Williamsport Pike*. As a kid my buddies and I played Army in those woods and we discovered a ready-made "foxhole" which we adopted as our command post, a hole about 8-10 feet square and 3-4 feet deep. That was in 1963 when I was 10 years old, a mere 100 years after the Battle of Gettysburg. One day I was headed to the foxhole via a deer trail when I literally stumbled over a piece of rusty pipe sticking out of the ground. It was kinda loose and didn't take much effort to yank it out of the ground. Lo and behold it turned out to be the socket end of a Civil War bayonet - rusted to hell and gone but easily identifiable, with about a foot of the blade left on it.

Fast forward 30 years and I was doing some research in the Western Maryland Room at the county library (looking for clues for Civil War encampments to investigate with a metal detector) and I read an account about that string of rifle pits and a lightbulb went on in my head. I hiked back to that old "foxhole" of ours, excavated leaves and sticks about two feet deep, and fired up the metal detector. I found four Confederate Gardner bullets (odd because they had been phased out long before Gettysburg), two Virginia brass buttons, a brass finial off of either a cap box or cartridge box, and an 1860 penny - all of which pointed to the Civil War time period, and Confederate in particular.

And people wonder why I'm a Civil War buff!

*Greencastle,Pa - Williamsport,Md Pike, right below our house, was where Lee's ambulance train full of wounded and sick Confederates headed to Williamsport and safety was attacked by locals I'm ashamed to say. They swarmed onto the wagons as they passed by in the rain and chopped at the wheel spokes with axes. That ambulance train was several miles long and local legend has it that the groans/screams/moaning of those poor boys could be heard a mile away as it passed through the mountain gaps and down to the Potomac. Forty miles of muddy rutted dirt roads, incessant rain, freight wagons with no springs, and no pain killers will do that......

I live 6 miles away.
First visited in the early 60s from New York…..upstate
My dad studied history and did his thesis on Gettysburg
He was alway quite the tour guide.
He moved 20 miles away from Gettysburg about 40 years ago.
Did volunteer work at the Army War College…..
Used to go to the Roundtables with him.
It is never boring. Always moving.
And yes…..Belle Italia and Dobbin house

Finding battlefield relics adds another dimension to being on or around the battlefield. At the Custer Battlefield in Montana, we have found such articles and they bring you closer to the actual combatants in the conflict. In our research, we have found several battle related relics that give you the physical connection to what went on all those years ago…

Penny has a cousin named Sonnenberg, who had a great grandfather or something there . His 7 year old boy looks just like that fellow’s picture on that wall. It’s uncanny’
I did manage to track down BCR’s great grand uncle who was with Barlsdale’s Mississippi Brigade. He was killed at the Sherfy farm by a canister shot. Nimrod Nash, Company I, Eleventh MS Volunteers.
Penny has a coworker who has an ancestor from one of the Pennsylvania Regiments. We found his name on the Pennsylvania Monument.
Shrapnel, about six years I stepped into a cornfield to answer a call of nature. I happened to catch my foot on an odd looking stone. It wasn’t stone! It was a shard of cast iron from a rifled gun, exploding shell!
My brother Dave was there when they caught a guy with a metal detector. That’s a big no no. A federal crime on NPS property!
Reon

So is taking a marker, but sometimes you can’t help yourself…

Sure they did. Their strategy was to beat up the Army Of the Potomac enough, they'd sue for peace. As to tactics, maybe so, but he sure scrwed the pooch at Gettysburg. Snatching defeat right out of the jaws of victory.

And with significantly less men. Gettysburg is magical. In my view there are a few places every American should visit:
Gettysburg
The Alamo
Pearl Harbor
Normandy
Little Big Horn

Not at Gettysburg. Lee's bombardment of the Union line prior to the disastrous Pickett's charge was way off target. The loss at Gettysburg was entirely Lee's/

😀😀😎Two years ago Penny and I were out looking for spooks with the headlights. We were driving through Devi’s Den area and saw two guys parked offf the road with lights and stuff looking around the rocks. We thought they had a metal detector, and when I met a ranger out the road, I notified him to check it out.
Later on we were at The Angle and the Ranger saw our car and told me that they had recorders and cameras, looking for spooks.😀 We would often stay in town and go on a ghost walk tour or just set in that short tower on Doubleday Avenue.
Penny heard a martial band and she swore she heard horses.
I got in the habit of Carrying a couple plastic shopping bags and when I park and get out, I take one along and pick up any litter I see. It cost me nothing, and that place is all hallowed ground to me. I won’t even drop a cigarette but.
Are you going to be there anymore this week, I can be there in a couple of hours and I’ll only use 1/2 a tank of gas!😀
Reon

I believe he saved the day, tho not in ways he could have anticipated.

His being where he was threw a further wrench into the Confederate battle plan, adding to their confusion and poor coordination. What it gave the Union was a defense in depth. A lot of blood was shed on both sides and time lost to the ANV in the repeated charges and countercharges to take and hold that ground even before they could threaten Cemetery Ridge beyond.

Contrast that to what could have happened if the ANV was facing an easily visible line of Federals atop Cemetery Ridge, even given their poor communication and coordination that day. Going in their morale was through the roof, confident of victory.

They knew to a man how this battle might win the war. Take that ridge? I believe they would have got it done.

Often wondered what would’ve happened if sickles followed orders to stay put

Longstreet's attack rolls forward without hitting the Sickles speedbump. Edward Porter Alexander advances his artillery to the Peach Orchard and pounds the Union line. The Union line breaks without the time and space for Hancock to rally reinforcements. The rebels still cannot follow up a tactical victory because they lack a finishing force, their troops are exhausted from the long flank march, and it is too late in the day. If the Union still manages to rally around the cemetery, then July 3 goes much the same as it did originally. If Meade loses his nerve, as Hooker did at Chancellorsville, then he retreats and maybe causes a temporary panic in Washington. But Vicksburg still falls on the 4th of July and the war turns out the same.

Lee was all out of sorts at Gettysburg. First and foremost he was dealing with an intestinal disorder, speculated to have been brought on by eating tainted food somewhere in PA along the way to that ill-fated destination. Kinda hard to think clearly when you're miserably squatting in a latrine more often than not. Secondly his right hand man and chief confidant, the guy he depended upon to bounce his ideas off of and whose keen evaluations and tactics were cherished, wasn't with him anymore - General Stonewall Jackson, who was killed at Chancellorsville a scant month before. Factor in his chief subordinates at G'burg either following orders desultorily (or not at all) and others acting with more bravado than good sense, and adding in a few simple boneheaded mistakes on their parts, it's no wonder they lost. The troops were willing but they too weren't in top form, remember they had covered some impressively long distances those weeks prior - in the heat/humidity of Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania summer, with half of them shoeless, living off the land because they were moving too fast and too far for logistical support from back home to keep up in a meaningful way. Lastly there was Stuart's absence - Lee's eyes and ears was off doing his own thing, whether through mis-interpretation of orders or glory seeking we'll never know for sure.

Add all that up and you have a recipe for disaster. What's amazing and inspiring is that even still they damn near managed to pull it off.

Note too that the Union army wasn't a whole lot better off. They too had covered tremendous distances on foot but at least they had shoes and supply lines that kept them fed. Army "management" wasn't any great shakes either - many of them were political appointees with little or no military experience. (Whose bright idea was it anyway to put politician Dan Sickles in charge of a Corps of infantry?) But, there were more of them than there were Confederates and that, dear hearts, is basically what decided the battle.