In Which John Burns Is My Favorite Old Coot Of Gettysburg

Let's go on a road trip!

Ohio has both a brand-new Wawa and a brand-new Buccees. Mr. Craft Knife and I tried the Buccees a few weeks prior when it was more crowded than Disneyland and I did NOT get the hype, but what with all our drives back and forth to Pennsylvania, I DO now get the Wawa hype!

I didn't ever tell you the story about how the kid and I messed up ordering at Wawa SOOOOO badly during our long-ago trip to see the college that would become her alma mater, because it is genuinely humiliating and the kid and I vowed never to speak of it again (while still almost constantly referring to it to each other, because we literally cannot process it, it was so embarrassing). But because of that, every time I visit a Wawa and its ordering kiosk has actual instructions, I always take a picture and get a little madder at the Independence Hall Wawa. I hate you, you guys! You exist in one of the biggest tourist spots in the country--WHY IS YOUR SPECIFIC ORDERING KIOSK SO NON-INTUITIVE?!? WHY ARE YOU SO HIGH-KEY RUDE ABOUT IT!!!

I once again managed to convince Mr. Craft Knife not only to come with me on this trip to pick our daughter up from college, but also to make a proper sightseeing trip of it, so I had someone to take pictures of me chatting with Lincoln at Gettysburg National Military Park!

Bro is soooo much taller than me--my feet barely even reach the ground in front of his favorite reading bench!

Also, he is the only person in the family patient enough to drive me wherever along the battlefield I want to go, hang out with me while I read every plaque, stand where I tell him to stand while I take photos of him in front of every significant (and insignificant) spot, and basically just do whatever I tell him to do while I am also being very, very, very boring about it.

I can remember the exact moment, approximately a decade ago, when I let a friend borrow my audio tour of Gettysburg on CD, but it's definitely too late to ask for it back now, ahem, so instead, Mr. Craft Knife and I relied on the NPS app for this first day of battlefield touring.

Here we are looking northwest towards the McPherson Farm:

On the morning of June 30, 1863, soldiers from the US cavalry and soldiers from the Confederate infantry were VERY surprised to discover each other on the road in front of McPherson's barn. In the image below, the road, Chambersburg Pike (because it runs from Chambersburg!) is the Hwy 30 just to the north of the McPherson Farm label, which marks McPherson's barn. My photos are taken from around the 1st Brigade 1st Division Cavalry Corps memorial.

This Confederate army, headed by Robert E. Lee, had sneaked past the US forces and into Pennsylvania, hoping to draw the US army out of the Confederate territories for the summer so that the Southern farmers could get a proper harvest for the first time since the war had begun, the better for the Confederates to steal it all later. He also hoped that putting battles in front of Northern faces would convince Northern politicians to press for peace, because who wants a battle right in front of their face (spoiler alert: definitely not the citizens of Gettysburg!)? He'd accomplished the sneaking part, and now he was stationed in Chambersburg, and his entire 75,000-person army was stretched in a big semi-circle over and around Gettysburg, busy pillaging and raiding and looting the countryside.

But the Union was chasing them north, just like Lee had wanted, except that Lee didn't know exactly where they were, because his cavalry, headed by Jeb Stuart, was also out and about, wandering around far from home base, and if Stuart sent Lee any communications about the location of Union troops, Lee didn't receive them.

The Union didn't know where the Confederate army was, either, but their 2,700-horse cavalry was nearby, trotting ahead of the army keeping their eyes open, and that's who spotted the Confederate infantry marching down Chambersburg Pike towards Gettysburg on June 30. The Confederates spotted them, too. 

And then both sets of forces literally noped out, lol! They both just reversed themselves right back where they came from and decided they'd deal with it tomorrow.

Which was July 1, 1863!

So, the morning of July 1, the Union cavalry had set up super early on Chambersburg Pike (the yellow road on the map), around the Herrs Ridge Road line (far left), keeping an eye out for the inevitable march of the infantry to show up from the west. When they spotted each other, that's when the Battle of Gettysburg began:

So, you've got 2,700 Union cavalry versus 10,000 Confederate infantry. Both sets of forces are basically just trying to hold off the other set until reinforcements arrive, but it's harder for the cavalry, because not only were they fewer in number, but they also didn't actually fight on horseback, so some of the cavalry had to opt out of fighting just to hold everyone else's horses for them. But it also sucks for the infantry, because every time they have to fight they basically all have to stop marching, and most of them have to get off the road and scramble over ditches and fences so they can line up right. And then they succeed in pushing the cavalry back a little bit, which the cavalry had actually planned for so they've got a few spots down Chambersburg Pike where they can retreat, and they have time to do that because before the infantry can follow them, they keep having to scramble back out of the fields and pastures and back into lines on the road.

Late in the morning, the Union cavalry finally got their first infantry reinforcements, the 1st Corp led by General Reynolds. He deployed the infantry to the north and south of Chambersburg Pike, including in that woods at the bottom of the picture. The woods mark the spot where he was also almost immediately killed, poor dude. Abner Doubleday was field promoted to take his place. But later that day, when General Meade finally arrived, he demoted Doubleday and made somebody else the 1st Corps Commander, and Doubleday pretty much sulked about that for the rest of his life.

Also, he maybe invented baseball.

The best part of the Google Map is that you can use all the memorials to figure out where everybody was in the battle. My favorite memorial is for John Burns, just north of the woods. He was just some old dude, a random pissed off civilian who'd already been agitating against the Confederate occupation in the previous days (including citizen arresting a few Confederates during their earlier pass-through, lol!), and who on this day took himself out onto the battlefield with an antique Revolutionary War musket to get those damn Confederates off his lawn, goddamnit! 

At one point, he managed to wheedle a proper rifle off of a wounded Union infantryman, and at another point, the general of the Pennsylvania infantry was able to convince him to at least go fight in the woods where he'd be out of the sun (and possibly the way, ahem). Burns paid him back, though, by fighting like a total badass in the woods, even shooting a Confederate officer clean off his horse. And later, when he was wounded and had to be left on the field while the Union soldiers retreated (more on that later), he convinced the Confederates that he was actually a non-combatant who'd just happened to get caught up in the cross-fire. They apparently didn't recognize him from his earlier agitation against Confederate troops, so they let him go back to town, where he recovered from his wounds and lived another nine years as a national hero.

Fun fact: when Abraham Lincoln came to Gettysburg the next year to dedicate the new national cemetery, he was asked if there was anything he wanted to do in town, and he replied that actually, he'd quite like to meet John Burns. So he did, and by all reports the two got along great!

Anyway, it's a good thing that Reynolds had deployed some of the Union forces north of Chambersburg Pike, because there was a whole northern segment of the Confederates, who'd been pillaging and looting north of Gettysburg, who had now managed to bust their butts to get back down south to meet those Union forces. They had a whole other fight on Oak Ridge, north of Chambersburg Pike and north of Gettysburg:

Buford's monument marks where that morning fighting was. Lincoln Highway is what they're calling Chambersburg Pike. At the bottom you can see the north edge of Gettysburg.

This spot has a nice observation tower where you can look out onto most of the first day's fighting:

This view shows where the Confederate forces came from the north:

And this view is to the southwest, back toward Chambersburg Pike and the morning battles:

There was a lot of back-and-forthing, and the monuments here are interesting to read because they're all, "In this spot so-and-so division was posted, then they advanced and shot some people, then they retreated and were shot at, then they advanced again for a little bit and did some more shooting, then they were chased screaming through town. Most of them died." Out of the 296 soldiers from the Pennsylvania division that this monument memorializes, seven were killed, 52 were wounded, and 31 were either captured or just plain went missing:

These new Confederate forces coming in from the north actually overwhelmed the Union force, who retreated south through the streets of Gettysburg (while the citizens cowered in their basements) all the way through town. Just south of town were two hills, one wooded and one bare, and that's where the Union was finally able to make their stand to end out the first day of battle.

The Gettysburg National Cemetery/Evergreen Cemetery area and Culp's Hill are where they ended up: 

And that's the end of the first day of battle!

Next up: dinner in a former field hospital, then a ghost tour with the world's most reluctant ghost tour guide.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!