After 10 days of traveling, I’m glad to be back home. I had intended to write a few columns during this cousins’ trip as I had in the past, but I was only able to take some notes along the way. So this column is about the first part of our trip, which fits the occasion of Memorial Day, and I’ll post a column tomorrow about the rest of the trip.
I was glad to be able to visit with my mom, sister and brother-in-law in Tennessee at the beginning and end of the cousins’ trip. Mom is hanging in there, and my sister is doing a great job of watching over her. Mom’s spirits are still good, and the whole family has gotten some much appreciated help from a woman who has been coming in to help two days a week.
I was also able to spend a day in Illinois having meals and visits with an aunt and uncle, as well as a few cousins who weren’t going to be traveling with the three of us.
Our trip this time was for five days, and the weather forecast changed our plans a bit. We had three sunny, cool days to start, and two rainy days at the end, so we opted to take my cousin’s relatively new Ford Explorer, rather than the ’76 Caddy convertible that we’d taken on our previous trips.
Regular readers may remember that that beautiful old car is less than completely water-proof, and its wipers less than efficient. Shakespeare was right when he said that “Conscience makes cowards of us all.” But if he were taking a long road trip in the rain in May of 2025, he might have had a few things to say about comfort and convenience, as well as conscience.
Anyway, we looked at the forecast, and then at the Caddy, and then at the forecast again. And then “our native hue of resolution was sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” So the Explorer it was.
The rain also changed the order of our trip. We’d originally planned to head east first, and then south to the Shenandoah National Park and Harper’s Ferry area. But the promise of some sunny days for our outdoor activities meant that we headed southeast and drove longer than planned on our first day.
Fittingly for this trip shortly before Memorial Day, we went to four battlefields. Tippecanoe (in Indiana) was first, the site of a much smaller battle in a war with Indians associated with Tecumseh. Though that battle was much more important to Liz Warren (#wemustneverstopmockingher), the three Civil War sites to follow dwarfed it, in scale and casualties.
We made it down to Clarksburg, WV late that night, and the next morning we visited the Shenandoah National Park, which was as beautiful as advertised. From there we made our way to Staunton, VA, a small town surrounded by wooded hills that punches above its weight, with a charming downtown and blocks of well-preserved old buildings. After lunch we went to the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum. That’s a modest place with pretty grounds, and a garage exhibit featuring a sweet Pierce-Arrow limousine billed as “The Chariot of the President.”
We didn’t tour the museum and house, partly because of time, but mostly because Wilson was a racist leftist president whose bossy wife was the defacto president when he was debilitated during his last year in office.
And I’ve already had my fill of that, and don’t want to support it any more!
That evening we made it to Harper’s Ferry, which made a strong, if strange impression on me. The site is lovely, with the old town occupying three or floor blocks along a hillside where the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers meet. There is a train station on the low ground closest to the Potomac, and a few inns and restaurants, but most of the old town is a national historic park, and basically shuts down at night.
Of course the town is best known for John Brown’s famous raid in 1859. Meant to start a slave rebellion, the raid failed, and most of the raiders were killed during the skirmish or executed afterwards. Because of its proximity to DC and strategic location on two rivers and a major railroad line, the town was fought over throughout the Civil War.
We stayed in an 1840 inn, and took the opportunity to wander around the town and watch the last commuter train of the day arrive from DC, before we ate a late supper. The next morning we were up early, before many people were out, and walked the mostly empty streets. The morning air was cool and refreshing, and smelled like honeysuckle. We made our way up to Jefferson Rock, an outcropping on which the great man sat in October of 1783, and pronounced the view one of the most beautiful he’d ever seen.
After coffee and breakfast, we crossed a pedestrian walkway attached to a railroad bridge over the Potomac, and climbed on a forested path, up a steep hillside to where a battery of guns had been stationed during the war. As we climbed, we were treated to intermittent views out over the valley and the town below, which confirmed Jefferson’s opinion of the scenery. The timber was full of birds, and the honeysuckle scent was even stronger there. On our way back downhill we began to see more people, but that morning felt like a tranquil break from normal life.
On the other hand, I kept thinking about something that was never far from my mind as we visited two more battlefields over the next 24 hours: What must it have been like to fight the battles that happened in those places? After a half hour of walking on a cleared, wide pathway up to where the gun emplacement had been, I couldn’t imagine hauling cannon up that hill, when there was no path and tons of obstacles, and only manpower and horsepower to accomplish the feat.
From Harper’s Ferry we drove the 18 miles or so to Antietam, site of the bloodiest one-day battle of the war. The visitor’s center had some interesting exhibits, and we watched a film recounting the course of the battle, before walking the nearest portion of the battlefield, and then taking a guided driving tour around a series of spots that followed the various stages of the battle.
I’d read a lot about the Civil War years ago, and watched Ken Burns’ excellent 10-part documentary on the war, so most of the key positions were familiar to me: Burnside’s bridge over Antietam creek, the Dunker Church, the Cornfield, etc. But it’s a different thing to see the actual site, with the monuments identifying which units were at which spots, and the gently rolling land on which so many men died.
I remembered reading about the Sunken Road (soon to be known as Bloody Lane) from which confederates were first able to ambush federal troops who marched right up to it without knowing it was there. But even as we drove into the small parking lot that the audio tour identified as the Sunken Road, we still didn’t see it until we’d left the car and were right on top of it. And then we could instantly understand how it turned into a death trap, once the union troops knew it was there, and could fire down into it.
The beauty and peacefulness of the day when we visited Antietam contrasted with the horrific battle that had taken place there.
But that was not the case when we arrived at Gettysburg, in a cold rain, the next morning.
The museum there was excellent, with many exhibits of weapons and uniforms, and a moving film that proved an old adage: you can’t go wrong with Morgan Freeman narrating. After watching the film, we went upstairs into the Gettysburg Cyclorama, a large round room, with a raised, rounded platform in the middle, surrounded by a gigantic, 360-degree oil painting of the battle. Between the platform and the walls, there is a hillside – complete with artifacts (cannon, wagons, rifles) and vegetation – that slopes away from the platform, and blends into the painting beyond.
After that we went out into a chilly, foggy rain, and took another driving and audio tour of the large battlefield. The low skies and grim weather seemed to perfectly match the somber events of the three-day battle, and once again I was surrounded by famous places I’d read about since childhood: Little Round Top, the Devil’s Den, the Wheatfield, Cemetery Hill.
Overall, Harper’s Ferry was too quaint and the landscape too charming to feel like a battlefield to me, and Antietam was too bucolic and the day too pretty. But experiencing Gettysburg under slate-gray skies and a cold rain was appropriately somber, and felt fitting, considering the bloody struggle that unfolded over three terrible days there.
On this Memorial Day, I’m in a Gettysburg state of mind, and I feel the kind of gratitude that it took the pen of Lincoln to express, when he wrote about our military men who “gave the last full measure of devotion” in the service of our country.
God bless them, and their memory.
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 