"They came forward with a rush, and how our men did yell, 'Come on, Johnny, come on!'" -Lt. Col. Rufus R. Dawes, 6th Wisconson, The Iron Brigade

After following the campaigns of the Civil War throughout Virginia and Maryland, we have finally arrived at what some consider a turning point in the war: Gettysburg. We spent the day examining the field over which the first day’s battle took place. We met our guide, John Archer, on East Cemetery Hill and began the day.

The tour began at a rarely visited marker that holds greater significance than its small size would suggest. West of town on the Chambersburg Pike stands a marker to Marcellus Jones who fired the first shot of the Battle of Gettysburg on the morning of July 1, 1863. John pointed out that the marker is probably accurate in its positioning, and we looked down the road, trying to imagine the feelings of Union soldiers as they saw Confederates marching down the Chambersburg Pike toward Gettysburg.

Throughout the morning, we investigated the positions held by Buford’s, and later, Reynolds’ men on July 1^st. John took us through the woods to trace the movements of the famed Iron Brigade as they fought near Willoughby Run where Confederate Brigadier General James Archer was captured by Union troops. Incidentally, John Archer is related to this Confederate prisoner, providing us with a closer connection to the battle.

The death that occurred on the field that day provided a central theme to the tour. Near the railroad cut, John reminded us that not all of the bodies buried after the battle were found in the years immediately after the war. From time to time in the past century, bodies of Civil War soldiers have been discovered on the field due to heavy rains or construction efforts. Only a few years ago, in the late 1990’s a skeleton was found in the dirt walls alongside the railroad cut. After close study, it was determined that the skeleton belonged to a Confederate soldier who could only be identified as such only by the few buttons still on his person.

Another instance of the horrors of war awaited us after lunch near Oak Hill. Brigadier General Alfred Iverson watched in despair as his North Carolinians were mowed down by a surprise Union attack on their unsuspecting left. The men fell in heaps, the wounded unable to escape for fear of being shot. After the battle, the dead were buried in a mass grave where they had fallen. In the years following the war, a grape vineyard was grown over the ground, and its owners insisted that the grapes there grew larger than those elsewhere in the area due to the morbid fertility of the land.

Before ending our day at the Union held Cemetery Hill, John took us into town. He reminded us that the battle was also fought on the streets of Gettysburg itself. He pointed out the difficulties of such street fighting, and the challenges that Ewell faced on the evening of July 1. Although many criticize Ewell for not pressing his attack on the evening of the 1^st, Archer argued that such an attack would not only have been impracticable, but also devastating to his forces. With that in mind, we ended our tour of the first day with the Union soldiers on East Cemetery Hill warily watching the campfires of the Confederates appearing across the ridges they had held earlier that morning.

Next time, we’ll begin once more on East Cemetery Hill to join the armies in their second day of hard fighting at Gettysburg.