Today’s Washington Post brings news that the National Park Service is finally taking the tourist-park elements out of the Gettysburg Battlefield:
GETTYSBURG, Pa. If you stand on the low rise known as Cemetery Ridge, above the killing fields of Gettysburg, you command one of the most important “what if” promontories of American history. It was here, on July 3, 1863, that the course of the famous Civil War battle might have turned. It was here that the Confederacy — or the rebellion — reached what became known as its “high-water mark.” It was here that the entire direction of the war might have changed, if Pickett’s Charge had decisively broken the Union line, if the election of 1864 had consequently gone against Lincoln, if the North, humiliated by a Confederate victory on Union soil, had sued for peace.
Generations of military men, amateur historians, little boys with dreams of glory and tourists of all stripes have stood on this site and wondered: What if? But a new set of questions and a new set of priorities have come to Gettysburg. The high-water mark, with its sweeping view of the mountains, its stone forest of memorial markers, its little copse of old trees that may, perhaps, be descendants of the original trees that once served as a focal point for the Confederate attack on Union lines, is again on the front lines of history.
With the opening today of a new, $103 million visitor center at Gettysburg National Military Park, Cemetery Ridge is undergoing the most radical change to its look and feel in a generation. The new visitor center, hidden in a hollow behind the ridge, has made both the old visitor center and the Cyclorama Building — designed by the renowned architect Richard Neutra in the 1960s — obsolete. And so, in an effort to return the battlefield to its original state, the National Park Service is about to tear down both structures, which have for decades sat squarely in the middle of the Union lines.
These changes are part of a rehabilitation project that has produced dramatic changes on the battlefield. In the early 1990s, power lines that ran along the Emmitsburg Road — one of several historic roads that converge at Gettysburg — were buried underground. In 2000, a hulking observation tower — a tourist trap that offered paying visitors the chance to survey the battlefield from on high — was demolished. And today, the Park Service continues to remove trees and build fences, in an effort to re-create the original sightlines of the 1863 battle.
Which, if you’re going to have an historical park on a battlefield site, is exactly how it should be.
