Gettysburg

Gettysburg is such a cute little old town full of history! It could take a whole week to see everything. A lot of the house there are original civil war homes that they have been restored. From the top of this memorial you can see just rolling hills that were all battlefields. I think the battlefield itself was around 10 miles all together.

This memorial is in the National Cemetary where Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg address, "Four score and seven years ago...". There are rows of unnamed soldiers graves numbered by the state that they were from. It amazed me how long it took for them to bury all of the casualties, something like 7 months.

Down town Gettysburg. Men fought downtown on this main street. There was a story of a women that owned a general store downtown where she lived on the second floor. She lived right across the street from a Lutheran church that they were using as a hospital. She braved the fighting and gun fire to cross the street to help as a nurse. When she returned home later she reached her shop to find blood on the front door step. She immediately thought her children that had been home on the second floor had been killed. She ran upstairs to find her family caring for wounded soldiers. Outside of the same building there is a picture of her standing in front of her shop. Come to find out that there was actually only one casualty in town and it was a women that had been cooking for the soldiers that had been standing by her kitchen window when she was shot by a stray bullet.

The cutest little shops downtown. This is where we stopped and had the best ice cream! I could not get enough of how cute the houses were back there. The old "salt box" style homes were everywhere. The most beautiful drive! There were a lot of homemade Amish quilts and farmer's markets along the highway. The girls looked for Amish people and farms.