In 1993, I was approached by the Friends of the National Parks at Gettysburg to write a series of articles for their newsletter. I was approached because much of my writing as a newspaper reporter had been on the effects of growth on the county.

The articles appeared under my byline and, incidentally, with the approval of my editor. An abbreviated form of the series appeared in The Evening Sun some time later.

With the permission of the Lawrences and the FNPG, here is the first of the four newsletter articles. Naturally, over the passage of time, some of this information has become outdated.

Yours,
Terry W. Burger

Gettysburg: 11/27/97

History pivoted in Gettysburg, not once, but twice.

On July 1-3, 1863, the Confederate Army, led by the near-legendary Robert E. Lee, made its first and only thrust north of the Mason-Dixon line, a move as bold militarily as it was shrewd politically.

Had Lee's move resulted in a military victory, the course of the war likely would have been shortened. But it was not to be. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, thought to be virtually invincible, dashed itself to pieces fighting toward a small copse of trees on July 3. Its tattered remnants fled back to Virginia, to fight on for two more years.

Four months after the battle, President Abraham Lincoln came to Gettysburg to dedicate the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg. ollowing a famous orator who had spoken for an hour and a half, Lincoln summed up the peril of the times in less than three minutes. To many, it is regarded as one of the greatest speeches ever made.

Months before Lincoln came to make "a few appropriate remarks" at Gettysburg, however, events occurred which began the process of turning the battlefield into a 6,000 acre memorial.

Only 20 days after the battle, a group of area businessmen began taking steps to preserve the sites where major chords of the battle were struck, including part of Little Round Top, Culp's Hill, Stevens Knoll and East Cemetery Hill. This effort to set aside forever land as national "hallowed ground" was a first, and in fact led to the creation, not only of the Gettysburg National Military Park, but to the entire system of national battlefield parks.

In April of 1864, that group of local citizens was granted a state charter to act as the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association.

In 1893, the Secretary of War appointed a commission to survey the battlefield and preserve the lines of battle. Congress formally established the park in 1895 and placed it under the care of the War Department. The act creating the park was pushed by New York Congressman Daniel Sickles, who had been a Union general at the battle.

The original Memorial Association voted to disband when the War Department took over, turning over all its debts and assets to the federal government.

In a reorganization of the federal government in 1933, the park was handed over to the NPS, under whose care it has remained.

The 1895 legislation establishing the park was flawed in one important area; it did not clearly define the limits of the park.

The language of the legislation directed that the park include lands in the vicinity of Gettysburg "not exceeding in area the parcels shown on the map prepared by Major General Daniel E. Sickles."

So far, so good. Sickles' map proposed a purchase of 3,874 acres in addition to the 522 already preserved by the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association.

However, the legislation also allows the purchase of "such other adjacent lands...necessary to preserve the important topographical features of the battlefield."

The entire area of major troop movements during the battle covered some 15,000 acres, including a large number of private holdings and the town of Gettysburg itself, federal acquisition of which was neither specified nor prohibited.

From the park's beginning, some have disputed the federal government's right to acquire property for protection from unwilling sellers. The first challenge occurred in the same year the park was created.

A trolley company which had constructed a rail line through the center of the battlefield to Devil's Den, despite objections by veterans of the battle and others, immediately brought a lawsuit against the government to block the acquisition of their land by the park.

In a case that has been used countless times since as a precedent in federal condemnation actions, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1896 in "United States v. Gettysburg Electric Railway Co." that the government had the right, indeed an obligation, to protect such areas.

"Can it be that the government is without power to preserve the land, and properly mark out the various sites upon which this struggle took place....or even take possession of the field of battle, in the name and for the benefit of all the citizens of the country, for the present and for the future? Such a use seems necessarily not only a public use, but one so closely connected with the welfare of the republic itself as to be within the powers granted congress by the constitution for the purpose of protecting and preserving the whole country," the justices' opinion read in part.

In the mid 1970s, the Senate Appropriations subcommittee in charge of the Interior Department, which in turn oversees the NPS, became concerned about frequent changes in plans for acquiring land at five Civil War parks whose boundaries were not set by legislation: Antietam, Manassas, Fredericksburg, Petersburg and Gettysburg.

That subcommittee asked the NPS to study precisely what areas needed to be protected. In the spring of the following year, the NPS submitted maps as boundary proposals for the five parks. In accepting the Park Service recommendations, Alan Bible, who chaired the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee, said alterations would have to be subject to the "full legislative process."

A number of failings were recognized almost immediately in the 1974 Administrative Agreement at Gettysburg, including the existence of a number of areas important in the battle that had not been protected. Despite the concerns over the Administrative Agreement, nearly a decade would pass before those failings would be put to the test.

The issue of just how much battle land needed to be protected came to a rapid boil in 1986, when the Gettysburg Battlefield Preservation Association, a private, non-profit group, obtained the 30-acre Taney farm, which lay outside the administrative boundary, and tried to donate it to the NPS, in a direct challenge to the 1974 Administrative Agreement.

Congressman William F. Goodling, whose district includes Gettysburg, successfully pressed his fellow legislators for a law requiring the Park Service to conduct a study of its boundaries needs.

Public Law 100-132, enacted in October of 1987, required the NPS to submit a boundary plan to Congress by the next October. The plan was pulled together with the help of public workshops held in Gettysburg in July, August and November of 1987 and March of 1988. The resulting boundary study, which included 14 "resource areas" containing key sites and features of the battle previously outside the park, was presented to Congress in August, 1988.

The machinery of government ground forward, and on August 14, 1990, President George Bush signed Public Law 101-377. For the first time since the battle 127 years earlier, the Gettysburg National Military Park had a formal boundary.

Having a boundary law in hand and making everyone happy with those boundaries are two separate matters. The intention of both the NPS and the new law is not to have the federal government end up owning all the land within the boundaries, but rather to obtain "the minimum federal interest necessary to meet park objectives for conserving and interpreting the battlefield." (GNMP Draft Land Protection Plan, Rev. April 28. 1993).

Simply put, the intention of the NPS is to purchase outright as little land as possible, leaving as much as possible of the 1,900 acres now within the park in private hands and on the tax rolls.