Gettysburg visitors center opens today
The new $103 million Gettysburg Museum and Visitor Center opens today at Gettysburg National Military Park.
The new $103 million Gettysburg Museum and Visitor Center opens today at Gettysburg National Military Park.
It relocates the hub of tourist activity well away from the battle lines of the defining North-South clash of 160,000 men, and restores Cemetery Ridge to the way it looked that summer 145 years ago.
Roughly two-thirds of a mile from the old center, the complex resembles a traditional central Pennsylvania farmstead, with a native granite facade and recycled barn timbers. Beginning this fall, a round barn will house the monumental Cyclorama painting depicting Gen. George Pickett's ill-starred charge of Confederate infantry up Cemetery Ridge.
The old center, which the National Park Service opened in 1971, sat directly on what many consider sacred ground: the Army of the Potomac's defensive line on bloody Cemetery Ridge, from which the Union troops fended off the Confederates during the first three days of July 1863.
