WHEN I WORKED at Gettysburg National Military Park, I regularly encountered visitors who imagined that some type of grand government master plan had created the park and accounted for the order and symmetry of its hundreds of monuments. Yet there is no master plan. The battlefield we see today with its orderly placement of monuments evolved over many years. The park was officially created by congressional legislation in 1895, but most of the regimental monuments were erected in the 1880s, before the U.S. government assumed responsibility for managing the battlefield.
At the time, the field was managed by the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association, an organization created in 1864, which initially viewed the battlefield as a monument
