Brian Black | Brian Black on the Copse at Gettysburg | Environmental History, 9.2

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Brian Black on the Copse at Gettysburg

WHEN I MADE my first childhood pilgrimage to Gettysburg, the battlefield attracted me because it did not equivocate. There was no doubt about what happened where and why. I learned how President Abraham Lincoln in November 1863 had spoken the words that had locked this place in immortality by stating preservation's futility: "But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract."¹ Today, as a historian researching this site, I have learned that confusion and doubt mixed with the valor of 1–3 July 1863, wound its way in and out of Lincoln's profound address, and extends to the present through contest over the meaning of sacred elements of the American landscape. In the twenty-first century, efforts to enhance the visitor's experience or to more effectively interpret the actual events of the battle have proven more embattled than ever.

Nestled in the midst of the Gettysburg National Military Park, the "Copse of Trees" (pronounced kohps) is arguably the most famous natural landscape that is tied directly to one of our nation's most important historic events.² History blows through the leaves of these broad chestnut oaks, yet the meaning of their sanctity varies from viewer to viewer. Such is the plight of Gettysburg, where a contest for the nation initiated a contest of meaning that continues 140 years later. The preservation of the battlefield took a dramatic turn in 1999, when the National Park Service extended its mandate beyond the preservation of the memorial landscapes—such as monuments, markers, and the copse—to the current ecology of the park. Although the 1999 plan involved an Environmental Impact Statement and fifty public hearings, the extent of the planned alterations to the landscape have unnerved some observers. To these critics, allowing the natural elements of the battlefield to become the tools of historic preservation at Gettysburg ultimately could threaten the copse and other natural elements that define this site.

Courtesy of the Gettysburg National Military Park Library and Archive.

The preservation effort at Gettysburg began as early as 1865, when a few Gettysburg businessmen followed Lincoln's urging and their own business acumen and began purchasing land. However, few of these "preservationists" knew the details of the battle. In fact, the history of the battle was not authoritatively gathered and written until the 1880s, when the original preservationists formed the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association and hired the battlefield's first historian, photographer and illustrator John Badger Bachelder. Beginning in 1864, Bachelder had met with many of the leaders from the battle. He sketched maps and illustrated books, which became quite ubiquitous during the 1870s.³ Bachelder almost single-handedly formed the events of July 1863 into a logic in which the landscape played a primary role.

While many of the site's topographical features became details of the battle (Little Round Top, Seminary Ridge, Wheat Field, etc.), the copse emerged at the battle's center. The trees grow near an area known as "The Angle," which lies near the Pennsylvania monument, just west of Zeigler's Grove (and the current Visitor Center) and toward Little Round Top. The Angle was named for the stone fence that bends to the west and then southward to border the small pasture where the original trees stood. Union troops took cover behind this wall during the battle; that alone would be sufficient to make the copse a historic site. But in a time of battle, features of the landscape take on multiple roles.

The copse, which rose less than twenty feet in 1863, was clearly noticeable to the Confederate soldiers from their position along Seminary Ridge.⁴ When General Robert E. Lee instructed his commanders for assault, and when these men directed the attention of their brigades, each pointed across the open wheat fields to the most perceivable goal. Although some historians have suggested the exact goal of the charge was a tall stand of trees included in Ziegler's Grove (which is nearer to Cemetery Hill), Bachelder led a generation of historians and visitors to believe the goal was the copse. Realizing the trees' crucial significance, Bachelder gave the copse a momentous new name: "High Water Mark of the Rebellion." After the 1880s, the Memorial Association added a monument and a fence around the Copse to denote the crest of the Confederate invasion of the North.

Endowed with this additional meaning, the copse became the most sacred ground at Gettysburg—appealing for very different reasons to visitors sympathetic to the Confederate and Union causes. The wrought-iron fence remains in place today. Unlike the fences of New England, about which William Cronon instructed a generation of historians, this fence designates more than property. It endows the copse with a powerful, commemorative status. As a tool of preservation, though, the fence has proven insufficient in recent years. This is due neither to vandals nor to over-zealous re-enactors. Instead, the problem is more insidious: during the last 140 years, these grand chestnut oaks that stand as symbol to North and South had the unmitigated gall to grow. In fact, Park Service forestry experts estimate that the copse now stands thirty feet above its appearance to General Pickett and others on 3 July 1863.

As a result of this growth, and of the plans initiated by the Park's 1999 General Management Plan, the copse eventually may be threatened. A complicated series of factors led the Park Service to re-think its mission at Gettysburg in the 1990s. The 1991 Statement of Management empowered the Park Service to preserve "important topographical features of the battlefield." In addition, the Park Service urged the preservation of "cultural landscapes" that reflect "pre-battle 1863 rural agricultural environment but includes those superimposed post-battle elements that are necessary for commemoration and visitor understanding of the battle." This included the re-introduction of forests, orchards, and agricultural fields where they were located at the time of the battle. Dividing parkland immediately adjacent to the main battlefield into sixty-nine "viewshed parcels," the Park Service then ranked each parcel for its impact on battle action and interpretive value to the visiting public. For this purpose, the NPS employed a military method known by the acronym KOCOA.⁵ This program of battlefield analysis allowed NPS planners to apply the view of the battlefield strategist to each detail of the natural landscape. Instead of using KOCOA to create a battle plan, however, the NPS used it to configure a preservation plan. Using these models to build on the recollections and written histories of veterans, planners, and historians assessed the likely value of each landscape feature during the 1863 battle.

Next, the Park Service created a series of four computer-generated landscape models (1863, 1895, 1927, and 1993) based on historical photos and written records. The inventory showed that in 1863, the acreage now within the park was a varied landscape, including orchards, agricultural fields, and homesteads. In addition to documenting conditions, analyzing landscape changes, and calculating view-sheds, Global Positioning Systems were used to provide "control points for map registration and to navigate to feature locations in the field."⁶ In short, computing technology allowed planners to achieve a sense of place that reached further than any single human life span to learn the nature of the changes to Gettysburg's nature over time.

In the 1999 Management Plan, restoration of the 1863 landscape became the centerpiece of the Park Service activities. As the plan stipulates: "Because natural systems are not static but dynamic, recreating and perpetuating the stage upon which real events took place requires a particularly sensitive and carefully coordinated natural resource management effort.... Although our natural resources are managed primarily for their historic values, we do not ignore or fail to mitigate, where possible, the effects of our management programs on the park's ecological welfare."

Another major goal of the project is described as battlefield restoration to create a sustainable historic environment by improving wetlands, water quality, and wildlife habitat.⁷ Since 2000, restoration activities at the Gettysburg Battlefield have included the implosion of the National Tower, the harvest of much of the white–tailed deer population (reducing the population from approximately 1,200 to 80), removal of non-historic trees in order to re-create the "woodlots" of 1863, eradication of non-native, pioneer species and the planting of thousands of native shrubs and plants, and the re-arrangement of orchards and farms. The copse exists above the fray of such furious preservation activity. It turns out that an even greater fence—one of meaning—protects the ever-rising canopy of the copse. Officially designated a memorial landscape, the copse was spared from the "forest canopy reduction" being exercised in some other woodlots. In the case of the copse, said Park Service historian Kathy Harrison, "we are protecting monuments." Small underbrush may be cleared from the copse, but only to allow the 1863 "witness" trees to continue to grow.

Is the battlefield landscape more protected than ever before? Or is it more threatened? A wrought-iron fence seems quite benign in the face of the extreme management practices now underway at the park. The ecology of this site in southern Pennsylvania now serves as the latest tool in maintaining the sacred significance of the Gettysburg Battlefield. Park Service employees stress that the public has never before taken such notice of battlefield management practices. The areas in which the 1863 landscape has been restored, they argue, allow tourists to better appreciate the ways in which the landscape influenced the fighting. Yet, even a basic knowledge of natural systems leads one to the realization that efforts to recreate the landscape of 1863 pursue the impossible. No matter how faithful the reconstructive process, of course, the computer-generated natures of 1863, 1895, 1927, and 1993 have never exactly existed outside of the hard-drive. To shape the natural landscape to conform to such ideals is folly and opens up an era of preservation likely to bring unfulfilled expectations. And yet, the effort derives from the best of intentions. Add another layer of symbolic meaning to the copse.

Brian Black is associate professor of history and environmental studies at Penn State, Altoona, and editor of Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies. His prize-winning Petrolia: The Landscape of America's First Oil Boom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) has just been released in paperback. He currently is writing Contesting Gettysburg, a landscape history of the Gettysburg National Military Park.

Notes

The author would like to thank Katie Lawhon, Kathryn Harrison, John Latschar, P. J. Sleber, Carolyn Itle, and Gabor Boritt for assistance in preparing this article.

^1. Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), remains the most useful source for understanding the cultural implications and importance of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. I have used a copy of the text from his book.

^2. This photo is one of the earliest records of the landscape of the Gettysburg National Military Park (GNMP). In 1900, when this photo was taken, the battle site had been purchased and set aside by local preservation groups, composed of equal parts patriotism and entrepreneurship.

^3. John B. Bachelder, Gettysburg: What to See and How to See It (1873; reprint, Dayton, Ohio: Morningside House, 1997). For an excellent discussion of the evolution of Gettysburg's tourist industry, see James Weeks, Gettysburg: Memory, Market and an American Shrine (Pd.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 2001).

^4. How do we know how tall the Copse was in 1863? National Park Service historian Kathy Harrison quotes the observation of a Union lieutenant who manned one of the battery's nearby. Forestry experts were then employed by the NPS to arrive at estimated growth patterns.

^5. Key terrain/Observation and fields of fire/ Cover and concealment/Obstacles (both natural and man-made)/Avenues of approach. A description of this process is included in Katie Lawhon, "Gettysburg the Way the Soldiers Saw it in 1863," CRM Magazine March 2002: 2.

^6. Curt Musselman, "Gettysburg's Codori Farm Lane Project," Applied Geography 19 (2002), 41.

^7. Portions of the GMP are available at: http://www.nps.gov/gett/gettplan/gmpintro.htm.

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