Day 1 - July 1, 1863

View looking North and West past the 14th NY Volunteer Infantry Regiment Monument

"THE sun rose, its rays poking through clouds and sprits of rain.  The first day of what was to be the continent’s greatest battle was at hand.  It would be just as the dusty mustached Union general had foretold.  Against the wishes of General Lee himself who wanted the army better consolidated, a fractured Confederate division under the command of the tentative Henry Heth of Virginia warily approached Gettysburg.  There it collided with a ready, willing and capable General Buford and his deployed blue suited horsemen.

Buford, the man whose division would stand off a much superior and well armed force of infantry for hours, would be dead in six months of typhoid.  Those nasty little bacteria thrived in human bodies and were shed in feces.  From there they contaminate both food and water and spread like wildfire.  They would have found fertile ground in any army camp of that day.  It wasn’t the feared Confederate bullet but unsanitary conditions and nineteenth century ignorance that were to kill John Buford.  But, the man had done what he needed to do.

As dawn melted into morning over the southeast Pennsylvania farmland, the light drizzle cleared.  The first skirmishers, probing ahead of waves of Confederate infantry, came into the view of a Union picket.  The vigilant blue trooper, chambered a round, cocked the hammer of his Sharps carbine, braced his weapon against his shoulder, aimed and fired.   Not long after, the crack of thousands of rifles and the boom of cannon signaled to all within miles that the course of American history was forever changed.  It was Wednesday, July 1, 1863."   - Route 15 to Gettysburg -