American Civil War

First Impressions: Gettysburg by Mark Herman

First Impressions: Gettysburg by Mark Herman

I’m not sure how many times I’ve visited Gettysburg. Enough to have the entrance to the town’s Holiday Inn burned into my memory, as well as the layout of several family friendly restaurants. I can close my eyes and picture Little Round Top as if it was in my back yard. Growing up every summer my family would drive for 15 hours from central Virginia to upstate New York to spend a couple of weeks by a lake in the Adirondacks. When I was young, we didn’t drive those 15 hours in one go, instead we would stop over at Gettysburg for a night and then usually spend a second night somewhere far less remarkable near the New York border. My father is a huge American Civil War buff and I think he really enjoyed sharing that with us at Gettysburg – we mostly enjoyed climbing on cannons and on the rocks by Devil’s Den. Still, of all the many, many battlefields he took us to (most of them in Virginia) I always enjoyed Gettysburg the most. Maybe it was because we were on vacation, but I always preferred it over Chancellorsville.