Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Gettysburg: Graveyard and Monuments...





Molly and William are standing on the memorial erected to the spot where Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address. The two panels on the sides have the speech carved into it, and William was fascinated by the letters. He found "Y" and kept pointing to other letters and naming them, but more often that not, incorrectly. It was very cute! The graveyard was very sad, with many, many unknown soldiers. There were so many dead, in such a short time that they had to bury the bodies as quickly as possible. I doubt they spent much time trying to figure out who was who in that day and age. Quite a few graves did have names, but one plot had over 400 soldiers with no name, and they didn't even know what state they belonged to! There were SO many monuments everywhere, it was amazing. They have an driving tour set up so we drove a good deal of it. It was 23 miles long, which surprised us both. We always thought the battle field would be just that: a field. This was miles and miles of land that had multiple battles that took place all over. It was very beautiful, and I thought about how it must have been so scary for the families that lived in the area at the time! I am really glad we went, I wasn't sure I wanted to spend a day at a battle site, but it was very interesting and I learned a lot.

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