The Transformation of Gettysburg as a Commemorative Space, 1863-2020

Gettysburg is a field of monuments. Visitors to the battlefield today see hundreds of monuments marking the field, dedicated to units, individuals, and states. The creation of this commemorative landscape was a process over time, with the first monument placed in 1867 and the most recent in 2013.

There are a few distinct phases in commemoration at the Gettysburg battlefield. The majority of Union monuments were placed before 1900, with veterans heavily involved in the process and the dedications. Between 1895 and 1921 the War Department and the Gettysburg National Park Commission placed official markers for brigades, divisions, corps, headquarters, hospitals, etc. These were placed for both Union and Confederate units, and make up the majority of the Confederate markers on the battlefield. There are very few Confederate monuments placed before 1900. The majority of the Confederate monuments (those not placed by the War Department and GNPC) were erected after 1913, with sixteen placed from 1960 to 2000.

The first timelapse shows all of the Gettysburg monuments from 1863 to 2020, marked by five color categories noted below. There are also timelapses for specifically Union and Confederate monuments.

Color Guide:

Blue: Union monuments

Red: Confederate monuments

Green: Confederate monuments placed by the War Department or Gettysburg National Park Commission

Orange: Union monuments placed by the War Department or Gettysburg National Park Commission

Yellow: Other monuments; these are typically monuments that do not specifically honor either side of combatants (such as monuments for Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address) or that honor both sides (such as the Gregg Cavalry Shaft and the Maryland State Monument).

Methodology Note: I complied my list of monuments and dates using Kathy Georg Harrison’s The Location of the Monuments, Markers, and Tablets on Gettysburg Battlefield crosschecked with the list on Wikipedia for reference and the Stone Sentinels website. Once I had my timeline (a version of which is at the bottom of this post), I used Stone Sentinels and GoogleMaps to locate each monument and place the corresponding dots on the map. There are a few monuments that the date or location could not be determined, and they were left off the map as well as a few monuments that were located outside the geographical scope of the map that I used. For series of monuments that were done in a date range (such as the Confederate brigade tablets done in 1910-1911) I put them all in last year of the range since we know they were all in place in that year. I tried to use the dates that monuments were place on the field instead of their dedication dates if they were different (and if I was able to find that information). I determined dates and locations as accurately as I was able, but these maps are certainly not perfect. For one, the monuments are placed in their current location on the maps. Some monuments have been moved or changed, and I did not note that. For example, in the 1880s several states made funding available for monuments; in some cases if a regiment already had placed a monument on the field they used the state funding to erect a bigger monument at their main location and moved the original (usually smaller) monument to a secondary location. In addition, these are the monuments that are currently on the battlefield; there are monuments that were erected and then removed to be replaced with different monuments and those are not noted on the maps either.

Special thanks to Elias Thompson for help with the video editing.

Dr. Kathleen Logothetis Thompson earned her PhD in Nineteenth Century/Civil War America from West Virginia University, and also holds a M.A. from WVU and a B.A. from Siena College. Her research is on mental trauma and coping among Union soldiers and she is currently working on her first book, tentatively titled War on the Mind. She currently teaches history at several colleges and university and leads tours of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Kathleen was a seasonal interpreter at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park for several years and is the co-editor of Civil Discourse.