Ford's Theatre and Gettysburg, PA - 8th grade trip day 3

We started day 3 at Ford's Theatre - actually shopping street vendors just outside where Julia scored a nice sweatshirt.  We took the theatre tour and learned of Lincoln's death there, but I was not in a position to get any worthy pictures.

We followed that by going to the Gettysburg Cemetery where we gathered by the site that was originally believed to be where Lincoln gave his famous Gettysburg address.  However, documentation has revealed that the marked spot is actually incorrect, but moving the marker would disrupt gravesites (I think), so the real site is marked with a flag pole.  Many of the 8th graders were assigned the task of writing the Gettysburg address in modern language, and one of them was chosen to read it at this location.  Leigh did a great job with it.

From there we proceeded to the Gettysburg Visitor's Center. The cyclorama presentation was fascinating, but we could not get the kids to go into the museum.  They hung out for too long near the gift shop and got a bit too squirrelly for the taste of most of the chaperones.

Finally, we started our Gettysburg battlefield bus tour where we learned that people came and watched the battle.  Say what?  One sixteen year old girl is memorialized in front of the house where she went upstairs to bake bread for the union soldiers only to have a stray bullet pierce the door and end her life.  

We learned that the north had good cannons, and we could identify them because they were black.  The southern cannons were green.  We learned how to determine a real cannon from a model.  We learned that some decisions changed the battle, and our country could be completely different today had a few minor things gone differently.

Fences as they would have looked.

A lookout tower over Gettysburg.  I don't do open stairs, so I did not get to check out the view from the top.

Devil's Den

We took lots of pictures of the kids at the memorials and looking over the battlefield.  I don't share them here due to my desire to respect the privacy of my friends.  It is a little strange to take pictures on sacred ground where lives were lost or in places where lives are memorialized.

The land was beautiful.  What surprised me about Gettysburg were the wooded areas and rolling hills.  I expected something more flat, and I guess I thought it would look more like a natural arena.

Then there was the broken bus.  We sat on the bus and waited for this one to be fixed just in case we had to take some of their passengers.  The ordeal ended with the bus driver taking a leak on the side where you see the trees in view of the girls side  of our bus (as much as you can see in this picture - we did not get a full view of the action - just enough to know what was happening, thank goodness).  The laughter from the moms was terrific.  

Thus ended day 3.