Gettysburg:: This Hallowed Ground
By Kent Gramm and Chris Heisey
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About this ebook
Kent Gramm
Kent Gramm is the author of November: Lincoln’s Elegy at Gettysburg; Somebody’s Darling; Gettysburg: A Meditation on War and Values; and The Prayer of Jesus; the novels Bitterroot: An American Epic; Cars: A Romantic Manifesto; and Clare; and three books of poetry. He is co-author with photographer Chris Heisey of Gettysburg: The Living and the Dead. A winner of the Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Prize, he teaches at Gettysburg College.
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Gettysburg: - Kent Gramm
Poetry by Kent Gramm
Photographs by Chris Heisey
TIDE - MARK PRESS
Windsor, Connecticut
© 2003 by Chris Heisey, Kent Gramm, and Tide-mark Press
Published by Tide-mark Press, Ltd.
P.O. Box 20, Windsor, CT 06095-0020
Printed and bound in Korea by Samhwa Printing Co.
Book design by Dan Veale
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without written permission from the publisher; reviewers, however, may quote brief passages in the context of a review.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gramm, Kent and Heisey, Chris
Gettysburg: This Hallowed Ground
144 p. cm.
ISBN 1-55949-884-6 (Print) Hardcover Edition
ISBN 978-1-59490-964-1 eBook Edition
Library of Congress Control Number
2003113659
CONTENTS
Photographer’s Note
Writer’s Note
The Battle of Gettysburg
66 Verses with Images
Writer’s Biography
Photographer’s Biography
Index of Images
PHOTOGRAPHER’S NOTE
WE ARE MET ON A GREAT BATTLEFIELD
By Chris Heisey
On July 4, 1863, the heavens began to pour upon the meadows and rocky ridges surrounding Gettysburg as a series of violent thunderstorms pummelled the small Pennsylvania town. The rain lasted for days, leading many to surmise that the torrents were God’s tears of sadness, and that the thunder was his rage.
I made my first trip to Gettysburg when I was an eight-year-old boy; it was also raining that June day in 1972. I lived only an hour north of the hallowed battlefield, so I thought the trip was no great journey. Yet sloshing about the battlefield with my parents as Tropical Storm Agnes deluged the killing fields was intensely memorable. I remember feeling a sense of awe, and it hasn’t left me since. Some 30 years later, the sheer magnitude of the carnage continues to strike me with wonder. I grew up in a town with a population of 25,000 bordered by a rival town with the same demographics. The horrific bloodletting is staggering to imagine — more than 50,000 soldiers, blue and gray, fell as battlefield casualties during the three-day battle of Gettysburg on July 1 – 3, 1863. Every one of my neighbors would have been killed, wounded or captured.
Despite the immensity of death, Gettysburg is a place blessed with monumental beauty. The historic landscape rolls with emotion and speaks to you if you take the time to listen. Dotting the sacred battleground are some 1,400 monuments that serve as testaments to the sacrifice so freely given that July long ago. Gettysburg is the home of the world’s largest outdoor sculpture display, and, like no other place in the world, this place stirs the soul.
Upon returning a few years after the battle, one veteran who had faced death remarked while looking out on the battlefield, This is holy ground.
Amen.
The same year that I made my inaugural pilgrimage to Gettysburg, I had an engaging second-grade teacher who whetted my mind for learning about history. There at Palmyra’s Pine Street Elementary School — a place that still stands now as it did then — Mrs. Sohlman encouraged me to read and write. I vividly remember thinking about the Civil War there in my small classroom, sitting next to my best friend as a gentle February snow innocently blanketed the playground just outside the windows. On the bulletin boards across the room hung two boldly colored pictures of Washington and Lincoln. Early on, Lincoln became my hero because of his perfect imperfectness. Never in my mind has there ever been a better writer than Lincoln.
Lincoln came to Gettysburg some four months after the battle in the browns of November to dedicate the cemetery where thousands were buried — many with the marker Unknown U.S. Soldier.
It seems such a pity to die without one’s name or identity. The very thought scared Lincoln.
We are met on a great battlefield,
Lincoln tells us in his famous address delivered there in the National Cemetery. When I first heard those words at Pine Street Elementary, I wondered to myself what those words really meant. What was President Lincoln telling me, the little boy?
Oftentimes growing up, I strayed from learning more about the Civil War, but the war was