Landscape Preservation and Interpretation:
Issues of Use, Historical Experience, and Myth at
Gettysburg National Military Park

Nathan Jefferson Riddle

I. Introduction

The Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania is currently involved in a major planning development process that presents dangerous precedents for federal historic preservation in the United States. Two integral components of the 1998 Draft General Management Plan and Environmental Impact Statement are the restoration of the battlefield to an 1863 appearance and, as a consequence of the desire for a recreation of the place, the demolition of Richard Neutra’s 1961 Visitor Center and Cyclorama Building. Various groups are opposing the removal of the historic Mission 66 visitor center, but the preservation arguments forwarding its importance are myopic. Focus on the building looks only at its historic architectural significance, without considering the obvious subtext of the park service’s plans, the need, even if based upon false pretenses, to create a visually ‘authentic’ harmonious refuge from modernity. Demolition of the historic modernist building represents only one aspect of a flawed plan.

Period restoration of the landscape deserves censure on two accounts. First, it is a misguided, spurious effort because the landscape is covered with over one-thousand nineteenth and twentieth-century monuments whose profusion precludes an ability to create an appearance of what the soldiers experienced at the Battle of Gettysburg. Secondly, the motive upon which the planned restoration is based is a dangerous supposition. Entrenched false, historical lessons define current park interpretation, and guiding the park service’s efforts is the desire to clarify the narrative by cleaning up the scene in which it is presented, without addressing its reified symbols. Beginning with its creation in 1864, the battlefield has undergone several periods of ownership, during all of which proprietors used and physically altered the landscape for various political purposes. Current interpretation presents a selective historical account that refuses to differentiate between the various layers of public memory inscribed upon the landscape. Gettysburg National Military Park is a coherent symbol of Heroism/Reconciliation/National Progress. Discussions of cultural contexts that shaped the park in both physical and ideational terms are nonexistent. Furthermore, slavery never enters the park’s collective memory.

By proposing a management plan whose primary goal is the restoration of a landscape to an historic appearance so that visitors may authentically experience the past, the National Park Service advocates and gives consent to the creation of historical simulacra for educational and entertainment purposes. Visitors will not know that the landscape is a reconstruction of the historic terrain, and they will concurrently be told that modernist architecture is non-historic and anathema to the values of the past. The park service is attempting to create a landscape to juxtapose and contemn modern society. For the National Park Service, the nation’s official historian, to unqualifiably suggest that the ideological, moral, and spiritual values of the past were superior to those of modern culture is a deplorable situation. What makes the Gettysburg plan so invidious is the fact that the lessons which the park service seeks to emphasize are historically and morally circumspect.

The landscape’s narrative, its interpretation, posits that death and violence are honorable if they are the results of idealism and patriotism. At Gettysburg, all the soldiers are equally honorable because they all fought for abstract causes, they all fought and died for what they believed in. The attempt to perpetuate a society based upon slavery never enters the interpretation of the battlefield. The ‘causes’ of the Union and the Confederacy are presented as the same thing, as having both been abstract variations on the proper form of constitutional government. Abstracting the causes of the Civil War and bestowing honor on the conflict suggests, rather blatantly, that violence is an acceptable means of achieving a social end based upon ideological principles. The frontispiece of this thesis shows, in front of the equestrian statue of U.S. Major General Oliver Otis Howard, a child wearing a Civil War cap and holding a gun playfighting with another child, who is outside the frame of the picture and who wears the cap of the opposing army. These children have obviously learned from American culture that the Civil War was exciting and honorable.

This thesis attempts to dissect the park’s proposed management plan to suggest that the National Park Service’s preservation arguments at Gettysburg are drastically flawed. The park service needs to renounce their intention to create an authentic, historic landscape appearance. Reconstruction of a landscape is as dubious as that of a building, and in the case of Gettysburg, reconstruction leads to and results from an extremely selective interpretation of history. Furthermore, the park service needs to repudiate their claim that historic sites necessarily offer important lessons.

Anti-modernism should not influence the preservation efforts of the federal government. Gettysburg, and other historic sites, should be used to illuminate continuities between the past and the present and should encourage critical debate. Interpretation at Gettysburg, however, negates informed discussion. The battlefield could be used more effectively for present relevance by discussing not only the Civil War but how the landscape has been used politically and socially to shape public memory. Finally, the National Park Service needs to immediately question their role in presenting symbols of national progress which imply that the nation’s institutions and power were built upon the efforts of idealistic and heroic patriot-soldiers.

This site composed and administered by Christine Madrid French 2004.