Bearing Witness To Death And Destruction

Let’s turn to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It’s an iconic American tourist site with a historic battlefield attracting more than a million people last year.

ED: For the first 80 years of its history, Gettysburg had just been a sleepy town of 2,400 people. But all that changed in the summer of 1863 when Gettysburg became the scene of a pivotal three day battle in the American Civil War. There, Union soldiers repelled the Confederate Army Second in what would prove to be its final attempt to invade the North. Both sides suffered devastating losses.

MEGAN CONRAD: The whole town was basically destroyed. There were dead mangled bodies strewn everywhere, because you have to imagine 160,000 soldiers just marched through this town, and 51,000 of them died or were wounded or just became missing.

ED: This is Megan Conrad, and she’s visited Gettysburg more than 70 times, and has studied the town’s transformation after the Civil War. In the course of her research, she came across the diaries of a local couple, Peter and Elizabeth Thorn, who describe the scene that they encountered when they returned home after the battle.

MEGAN CONRAD: They saw 150 dead bodies outside of their home, and they decided to just start digging, and put the bodies in graves.

ED: Before many of the bodies were even removed, thousands of visitors began streaming into Gettysburg. Many were Northerners looking for loved ones who had fought the battle. But Conrad says that families of soldiers weren’t the only ones who descended upon the town.

MEGAN CONRAD: People came because they were just really curious and wanted to see the destruction of a battle, and they wanted to have pieces of a battle. Because this is the first time that a battle was in the North, so this is something very new to Northerners. They hadn’t ever seen something like this, so they’re so curious about what does this look like. So they’re interested in the death and destruction, and they want the bullets, and they want the scraps of bloody clothing, and they want the relics that we look back at now, and we’re like, why would you want this?

ED: There’s a famous story of a minister finds a Bible that’s been blown in half by a gun, and soaked with the blood of Confederate. They take that to use as an object of a sermon. Yeah, you’re right. The people are scavenging for souvenirs at the same time other people are looking for their fallen sons and fathers. So these people who were coming to Gettysburg– we could call some of them tourists. Is that fair?

MEGAN CONRAD: Yeah. I do.

ED: OK. Well, the problem was that there wasn’t anywhere to stay much before the battle, and certainly after the battle there wouldn’t have been hotels or inns or anything. So where did they stay?

MEGAN CONRAD: So people who actually had homes that weren’t completely destroyed opened up their homes, and they allowed people to stay with them, and they profited and turned this into a business. So for instance, I stumbled across a letter that a citizen George Arnold wrote to his friend. And in that letter, he mentions how he and his wife were exhausted for hosting all of these people, and he’s also charging them a profit for staying there. So it’s like the first bed and breakfast in Gettysburg, if you will. So whether they were the visitors coming to see their family members or they were these curiosity seekers, they stayed in people’s homes until more hotels and such were built later on.

ED: So all these people are flooding into Gettysburg right after the battle. Did Gettysburg encourage their arrival?

MEGAN CONRAD: Gettysburg knew that something dramatic just happened, that something monumental definitely happened to their town. So this whole sense of pride and this sense of we need to preserve what happened here is very prevalent among all of the townspeople, which is really incredible given that their whole town was just destroyed, and they’re considering of we need to preserve this historical moment.

ED: Conrad says that leaders in Gettysburg reclaim the town not only as hallowed ground that deserve preservation, but as a tourist destination. By the 1890s, visitors tired from shopping downtown could get on an electric trolley that took them to the elegant Katalysine Springs Hotel, which sat right on the battlefield.

MEGAN CONRAD: When soldiers came back to celebrate the anniversary of the battle they could stay at this hotel. When tours came to town they could stay there. But it was also a spa. So these springs were rumored to have healing powers, and they could heal wounded veterans, and they could provide luxurious time to the women who were just too hot and tired to be bothered with walking around the battlefield all day. So it’s very luxurious type of area, and the electric trolley had a stop directly right in front of the Katalysine Springs Hotel.

ED: Do you see over time– what are the popular tourist attractions that people go to in Gettysburg?

MEGAN CONRAD: So for instance, there was souvenir stands. You could buy relics from the battlefield. You could buy scraps of clothing. You could buy minie balls. There was dancing pavilions. Then the amusement parks were also on there. There were three different amusement parks set up by different people. They had lemonade stands. Once the car comes along, they do the battlefield bus tours. They are driven through the battlefield, and they learn all about the history.

ED: So Megan, I heard a story, may be apocryphal, one time that a student group was touring the Gettysburg Battlefield, and one kid asked, so did they shoot from behind all these monuments? So when were those monuments put up and who controlled that process?

MEGAN CONRAD: Starting in the 1880s, 1890s, and on, all the different states were allowed to create their own monuments. And so that when people visited, they could really get a good picture of the Gettysburg battle, that it wasn’t just this whole memorial to the Union soldiers, and what happened there. You wouldn’t to be able to imagine what happened unless you saw the Confederate side of it, because the Confederates were ahead for the first few days.

ED: So people still, despite the restaurants and the tacky shops, and even in the past electric railways and amusement parks come to the town with a great sense of reverence. It seems to me that that’s been an enduring quality of tourism in Gettysburg is that people don’t forget that what happened here was a tremendous loss of life and in some ways an important chapter in the saving of the nation. Are you struck more by the continued reverence or the dangers to it that tourism presents?

MEGAN CONRAD: I think tourism helps it, 100%. For instance, my friends and I, we always do ghost tours. And it’s a really big booming business in Gettysburg. It’s lit, like you walk down the streets, and they’re shoving pamphlets in your hands, and it’s insane. But it’s this way that people who are, they’re like, oh, it’s something fun for us to do.

But on those ghost tours they’re telling you bits and pieces of history of who died here. And this house was a makeshift hospital, and you can imagine the limbs piled outside. And this courthouse was used as a hospital, and the bottom of it, there was just a pool of blood like a foot deep. And while they might be embellishing a little bit, people who might not be interested in history right away are now engrossed in it, and they’re fascinated by it.

And it took them to this point to get to Gettysburg, and maybe they came because they thought it’d be a fun day with friends, but they’re leaving knowing what happened to this town, and they’re leaving knowing the monumentalness of what happened to Gettysburg, and all the lives that are lost. And you still go to the Soldiers National Cemetery and it’s silent. Even little kids. They’re running around, but they’re not making a peep, because they understand the reverence of it.

ED: That’s historian Megan Conrad. We spoke to her from WITF at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.