The Gettysburg battlefield and monuments

We stopped in Gettysburg PA to see the battlefield and monuments to all the men who fought in this Civil War battle.  It’s very well-known so I won’t put in any details about the battle itself.

One thing I did not know was that when the battle ended, both armies continued on their campaigns and left the dead and wounded where they lay!  There were over 7,000 men from both sides that died at Gettysburg and they lay all around the town and fields outside of town for days…weeks…months…while the few hundred people who lived there, mostly old men, women and children since all the young men were gone to the war, struggled to care for the wounded and bury the overwhelming number of dead soldiers.  During the months after the battle, and continuing long after the war was over, relatives of those who died flocked to Gettysburg to try and find their relatives.  The townspeople had to deal with the aftermath of this battle for a LONG TIME!

Here are pictures that we took during the auto-tour of the area…it was too large and spread out to do it any other way! :

Flight 93 Memorial – the fourth hijacked plane on Sept 11, 2001

While in western PA we visited the Flight 93 Memorial.  It’s not finished yet, the visitors center and much of the information that will be available is not yet there.

But, they have a small area near the parking lot with some plaques showing information about the flight and passengers/crew members.  From that area there is a walkway in black concrete with a short wall on one side that leads to the memorial wall.

The walkway takes you past the area where the plane actually crashed.  It took out part of a hemlock forest and is now a grassy meadow.  Once they recovered as much debris as they could, and as many bodies as they could, they covered in the crash area (which was a big hole in the ground) to make the meadow.

The memorial wall contains 40 marble panels standing upright and connected to each other.  Each one contains the name of a passenger or crew member who was on the flight.  There are 40 in total.

This is a memorial to what I consider to be very heroic people.  They could have huddled in the back of the plane and done nothing – but instead they forced their way to the cockpit and made the hijackers go down early, instead of taking the plane to the intended target; later determined to be the capital building where both the House and the Senate were in session that morning.

Here are pictures we took while there: