Adams County: Tranquility Regained

One of Pennsylvania’s smaller counties, both in size and population, Adams County developed much the same as similar settlements along the Atlantic Seaboard. Its growth during the past two and a half centu­ries has been governed by its own particular circumstances, including location, terrain, soil, climate, vegetation, min­eral resources and the accom­plishments of the immigrants and...
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An Admirable and Befitting Arrangement: The Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg

After the battle, the fields looked and smelled like hell on earth. The bodies of the fallen had quickly begun to decom­pose. Where shallow graves had been dug, arms, legs, and heads were reported to have penetrat­ed the surface. In some places, hogs rooted out corpses, devouring them. The immense, ghastly campaign at Gettysburg, fought July 1 through 3, 1863, was over. As General Robert E. Lee...
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Bookshelf

Guide to Pennsylvania Troops at Gettysburg By Richard Rollins and David Shultz Rank and File Publications, 1998 (106 pages, paper, $17.95) The Battle of Gettysburg was the nation’s most fierce military engagement. Pennsylvania alone dispatched well more than twenty-four thousand men to the epic onslaught, waged the first three days of July 1863, that resulted in more than fifty-one...
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Museum and Visitor Center at Gettysburg National Military Park

The newly opened, $103 million Museum and Visitor Center at Gettysburg National Military Park, the result of a cooperative project between the National Park Service and the Gettysburg Foundation, places the American Civil War’s turning point in perspective, using exhibits, sound, video, and setting to give visitors a deeper understanding of the war and its impact. A decade in the making, the...
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Lost and Found

Lost Southern soldiers largely restrained themselves from destroying private property during the American Civil War’s Gettysburg Campaign. Their final foray into the Commonwealth, however, was drastically different. On July 30, 1864, Confederate Brigadier General John McCausland’s forces torched the Franklin County seat of Chambersburg in southcentral Pennsylvania in retaliation for Union...
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Making Peace on the Gettysburg Battlefield, Fifty Years Later

For six frenetic days in 1913, from Sunday, June 29, through Saturday, July 4, two armies – fifty-four thousand strong combined – invaded Gettysburg for a second time. They fought the first time a half century earlier, July 1-3, 1863, and were looking forward, admittedly many anxiously, to facing each other again. It wasn’t a fight they anticipated at the second meeting,...
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At the Gettysburg Battlefield with Traveling Photographers

  As Union and Confederate troops converged on the Adams County community of Gettysburg in mid-summer 1863 to wage what has been described the pivotal battle of the American Civil War, little did they know how long it would take for the rest of the world to discover the outcome. Of the five hundred journalists who covered the war, forty-five reported on the Battle of Gettysburg waged from...
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