America's Best Idea: National Park Getaway

Date: January 31, 2011
Contact: Katie Lawhon, [phone]

(NPS)

Gettysburg National Military Park in southern Pennsylvania is this week’s pick in the National Park Getaway series. A winter walk around the fields at this American pilgrimage destination offers an opportunity to study the topography of this famous battleground and inspires quiet reflection.

Each year, a million visitors explore Gettysburg National Military Park, site of a massive battle, and see the battlefield the way soldiers did at the time of the fighting in July 1863. On this soil, the fate of America’s "experiment in democracy" hung in the balance, as it did during the entire Civil War.

Gettysburg National Military Park resembles a bottleneck, in that the battlefield, location of a single, military engagement, opens, for visitors, onto the rest of the four-year American Civil War, as well as onto the buildup to this conflict and the era of Reconstruction that followed in its wake.

The park’s museum showcases one of the most extensive Civil War collections in the nation. Check out the exhibits, as well as the town of Gettysburg, and walk in the footsteps of President Abraham Lincoln, who outlined the future of the nation here in his Gettysburg Address.

Get introduced to Gettysburg National Military Park and previous Getaway destinations at www.nps.gov/getaways.