October 21, 2012, Gettysburg National Cemetery and Visitor Center

October 21, 2012, Gettysburg National Cemetery and Visitor Center.  We toured the National Cemetery and Visitor Center this morning before leaving Gettysburg.  The Cemetery is, of course, sacred ground.  Not all of the 10,000 soldiers killed are buried there.  Many are still buried where they fell although an effort was made to exhume them.  The cemetery was dedicated by President Abraham Lincoln on November 19, 1863.  In about 250 words, the President refocused the attention of the nation on the reasons for the war.  He summed it up by declaring this was an opportunity for a "rebirth of freedom."  Lincoln thought the speech fell flat in the moments after he finished.  Little could he have expected that his "few appropriate remarks" would become the most memorized and quoted speech in history.  I recall memorizing it in the 8th grade at Hannibal Junior High School.

The Cyclorama at the Visitor Center has been completely and miraculously restored.  We saw it in 1988 and it was pretty ragged.  From 2003 to 2008 millions were spent to put the wonderful picture back in its original condition.  It is a state-of-the-art 360-degree view of the battlefield on day three just as Pickett's Charge is repelled by Union forces.  I tried to photograph several scenes, but the quality doesn't come through in the reproduction shown above.  You'll just have to see it yourselves.

We are now about 250 miles west of Gettysburg in Washington, Pennsylvania.  We are about 20 miles from the northern finger of West Virginia.  We are about 30 miles from Ohio.  We will spend tomorrow night somewhere around Indianapolis.  We want to revisit the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Illinois.  We should be home Wednesday night.