Four Score and Seven Years Ago....

Only 90 minutes from Washington D.C. is Historic Gettysburg.  The bloodiest battle of the Civil War with 54,000 casualties.  We hired a driver to take us through the park.

The Eternal Peace Flame is to commemorate the peace between the states.

I had a good conversation with our guide who has lived in Gettysburg for 30 years about the current Confederate Flag issue.  It amazes me that, with the current events and even past events, that a flag would be flown that is the cause of so much death, destruction, and discontentment with our Great Nation.  

This is the view from the High Water Mark of the battle of Gettysburg.  The majority of the battle took place over the hills and in the forrest.

It blew my mind to imagine over 100,000 troops fighting and dying over this area to protect our Nations Capitol, where we just were.

Gannon decided he liked the Union uniforms better. :)

We left somber, tired, and with a new perspective of our Civil War.

Raising the White Flag

Since we'd trekked a bit off our trail for cousin time, and we'd left Goldsboro a bit later than we'd hoped for,  we opted to detour from our initial landing spot of West Virginia, and settle for just plain old Virginia.  We found our tent to be, very thankfully, waterproof.   We grabbed our umbrellas and headed into town.  

Historic Richmond has an amazing Civil War museum right next to a National Historic Site.   Treadwell Iron Works were a Confederate iron factory with So much history.  The kids learned about water power,

Civil War economic shifts,

And period clothing.  There was a surgeons kit that made me very thankful for v progress that has been made in my field in the last hundred fifty years.

We toured the battleground at Richmond where there are cannons poised in the fields were the Union and Confederate armies would have met.  It was a rainy day, and the roar of the thunder, if you closed your eyes, was actually the firing of the cannon as troops met near the end of the war.

With only an hour and a half to the west being one of the most historic points of the Civil War, we trudged over to Appomattox.

A Union soldier told the children about his loneliness on the road, and introduced him to his pet stick Joe. Joe did very well with his trick of "sit and stay".

We toured the McLean house where Lee and Grant met. It was here at this desk that the Confederation and the Union begin the healing process of becoming the great United States of America.

It was an honor and a privilege to see the original surrender paperwork on display for the 150th Year celebration. I literally almost cried.  The Appomattox area closed at 5, which worked well for our schedule as we could go ahead and begin our drive into West Virginia