Because my family wanted a more in-depth explanation of this titanic clash, we stopped inside the visitor center and hired one of the licensed battlefield guides. A very helpful guide joined us in our van, completing the Gettysburg lessons that Foote and Burns had begun years before. The tour's two hours were sobering, but we felt it was the least we could do to understand a struggle that scarred so many American families for so long. Since military strategy, good and ill, decided Gettysburg, it seems fitting that travelers take a short detour out of the 19th century into the 20th, visiting the farmhouse of Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower near the battlefield. Recently renovated by the park service, the house is set in 1969, the last year the Eisenhowers lived here together.
Travelers arrive by bus from the park's visitor center.
Ike's desk, made from salvaged White House floorboards, is on display, along with Mamie's porcelain and figurine collection and family photos. Eisenhower, who led the Allied D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944, certainly knew about hallowed ground. It has never been effaced from my memory, day or night, for 50 years. Betsa Marsh is a freelance writer from Cincinnati. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.