Four Score & Seven Stories Ago
The writers group I belong to is called The Gettysburg Writers Brigade. It’s a great group of experienced and new authors who get together weekly to talk about the craft and have fun. We have published our first anthology just in time for Christmas. Four Score & Seven Stories Ago is a collection of fiction and nonfiction about Gettysburg. Eleven talented members of the Gettysburg Writers Brigade have created stories related to the most-famous small town in America. My original story, “Finishing the Charge,” is included in this collection. It is the story of an elderly veteran who won’t live to see the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, so he leaves what he considers his failed life in Virginia behind and starts walking to Gettysburg. He feels driven to complete Pickett’s Charge. He survived the devastating Confederate charge Read more…
Gettysburg’s Least-Visited Monument
Along the winding Howard Avenue in Gettysburg, you pass monuments that mark the actions of military units such as the 107th Ohio Infantry and the 58th New York Infantry. The monuments sit so close to the road that you don’t even have to leave the comfort of an air-conditioned car to read the inscriptions on the stone blocks. At the crest of the road, a cluster of monuments, statues, cannon, and a flagpole mark the events that took place in July 1863 on Barlow Knoll. From that crest, you can look northeast down the slope of Barlow Knoll to the tree line along Rock Creek. Within those trees is what is arguably the least-visited monument on the Gettysburg Battlefield. Although there are no visitor statistics for monuments, this monument is so isolated that you have to know what you are Read more…
Tanks for the Memories: Camp Command Brought Eisenhower to Gettysburg for the First Time
More than 8,700 Confederate Army veterans lived to attend the 50th anniversary reunion of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1913. They camped on the field where General George Pickett and his men had made their brave charge more than mile across an open field into the cannons on the Union Army in July 1863. Veterans of that charge would have been among the old men attending the reunion. They would have looked at the field covered with tents where the veterans camped during the reunion and remembered that the ground had been covered with bodies 50 years earlier. In that desperate charge, many of the unprotected soldiers had been felled by bullets. Had the veterans returned five years later, they still would have seen tents on the field where so much Confederate blood had been shed. They would have also Read more…
Edward Woodward: Poet, Gunsmith, Souvenir Maker
Edward Woodward was a creative man who came to America from England in the mid-1850s seeking an opportunity to display his creativity. What he found when he and his father arrived in Baltimore was a land of simmering tensions that soon erupted into the Civil War. On April 19, 1861, a regiment of Massachusetts soldiers was transferring between railroad stations in Baltimore. To do this they had to disembark one train and march through a city filled with Confederate sympathizers to another station where they could board a train to Washington. The sympathizers attacked the soldiers, blocking the route and throwing bricks and cobblestones at the Union men. The soldiers panicked and fired into the mob, which led to a wild fight involving the soldiers, mob, and Baltimore police. When all was said and done, four soldiers and 12 civilians Read more…
The Spanish Flu hits Adams County (Part 3)
The second wave of Spanish Flu hit Adams County particularly hard in the Fairfield area and the eastern part of the county. One doctor was quoted in the Star and Sentinel as saying, “I have just come from four homes. Three or four people were sick in every one of them. One of the families had both parents and the two children ill. I have another family in which there were six cases.” Reports said the second outbreak wasn’t as pervasive, but it could still be deadly. This is typical of locations where there was a second outbreak. I have a theory about that. In the early part of 1918, the world experienced a typical flu outbreak. It wasn’t deadly, but what was discovered by researchers was that people who had that flu fared much better during the Spanish Flu Read more…
The Spanish Flu hits Adams County (Part 2)
Spanish Flu first appeared in Adams County around the end of September 1918. It almost always it made its first appearance in any community during the last week of September, whether it was here or in Europe where there was fighting. This could indicate that that there wasn’t a flash point location so much as this was the strain that had developed in 1918 and mutated. That is a point that is argued, though. Some have tried to set an origin point. Boston and in Kansas are the most-common locations suggested. The Gettysburg Compiler reported on Sept. 28 that the flu had broken out in Camp Colt, Gettysburg’s army training camp. At this point, they believed that it had come from soldiers who had been exposed to it in Camp Devens in Massachusetts, which is one of the places in Read more…
Gettysburg goes audio
At 2 p.m. on Sunday, August 27, 1950, Robert Smith, an announcer engineer, pushed a button and the miracle of Marconi came to Gettysburg and the surrounding region. Music was transmitted through the air from a location north of Gettysburg into people’s homes miles away. Though radio had been around since the early years of the 20th Century, WGET Radio became Gettysburg’s first commercial radio station. The first thing Gettysburgians heard on their radio station was “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Then Owen Voight, another announcer engineer for the station, stepped up to the microphone in the main studio and said, “Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. This is Radio Station WGET signing on its initial broadcasting day WGET transmits on a frequency of 1450 kilocycles, with a power of 280 watts as authorized by the Federal Communications Commission,” the Gettysburg Times Read more…
Speed Racer: Regie Johnson’s days competing in autocross
Gettysburg resident Regie Johnson looks like a sixtyish grandmother who you might see tending a garden or taking a stroll outside. However, put her behind the wheel of a sports car and watch what happens. She and her husband, Keith, were window shopping at a Jaguar dealership a while back. They showed enough interest in the cars that they were invited to a special luncheon hosted by the dealership. It was catered at a race track so that the guests could test drive one of three Jaguars models. Regie got behind the wheel and was driving around the crowded track. She told the salesperson who was in the car with her that she’d like to see how it would really perform. He was skeptical, but he set up a pylon course and cleared the track of other drivers. “Regie went Read more…
Where Fairytales Came to Life on a Civil War Battlefield (Part 2)
Fantasyland, the amusement park on a portion of the Gettysburg Battlefield, was an immediate hit. The Gettysburg Times noted in 1959, “’Fantasyland,’ which is Gettysburg’s newest major tourist attraction, outgrew its facilities for handling crowds on the second day of its operation.” During the opening weekend, 4,500 people entered the park and that number quickly grew to 4,800 by the third weekend. Weekdays saw 500 to 700 people a day visiting the park. “We never turned anybody away,” Jacqueline White, daughter of park owners Kenneth and Thelma Dick, said. A second entrance even had to be built to handle the weekend crowds. White started working at the park when she was only eight years old. She played Little Red Riding Hood walking through the park and talking to the visitors. As she got older, she worked other jobs in the Read more…
Where Fairytales Came to Life on a Civil War Battlefield (Part 1)
It was a place where families made happy memories, and now it only exists as happy family memories. Fantasyland in Gettysburg, Pa., entertained tens of thousands of youngsters and the young at heart from 1959 to 1980. Kenneth and Thelma Dick took their family to the shore for a vacation in 1957. On their way home, they stopped at Storybook Land near Atlantic City, N.J. It was a small park, planned to entertain young children like the three Dick girls. “My mother kept saying the whole time, ‘I could do better than this. This is so okay, but I could do something so cute,’” Jacqueline White said. She is the middle child of the three Dick girls between her sisters, Stephanie and Cynthia. White’s parents spent the four hours of the drive home, planning the Read more…
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