Gettysburg battlefield is restored to a landscape Civil War soldiers would recognize
GETTYSBURG, Pa. — On Tuesday morning, Lincoln portrayer Jim Getty will recite the Gettysburg Address as part of an elaborate celebration of the 150th anniversary of the president’s original remarks in the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in the heart of the Gettysburg National Military Park.
A few hours later, a much smaller crowd is due to gather around a baby apple tree to mark its planting in a quieter corner of the battlefield. The four-foot sapling will join a grid of 167 others newly installed in the reestablishment of an 11-acre fruit plantation known as the Bliss Orchard.
While the apple-planting ceremony promises to be more subdued than the cemetery event, the trees will grow to express a different and no less eloquent narrative of one of the bloodiest and most fateful battles in American history....