Poetry by Kent Gramm

Photographs by Chris Heisey

TIDE - MARK PRESS
Windsor, Connecticut

© 2003 by Chris Heisey, Kent Gramm, and Tide-mark Press

Published by Tide-mark Press, Ltd.
P.O. Box 20, Windsor, CT 06095-0020

Printed and bound in Korea by Samhwa Printing Co.
Book design by Dan Veale

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without written permission from the publisher; reviewers, however, may quote brief passages in the context of a review.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gramm, Kent and Heisey, Chris
Gettysburg: This Hallowed Ground
144 p. cm.

ISBN 1-55949-884-6 (Print) Hardcover Edition
ISBN 978-1-59490-964-1 eBook Edition

Library of Congress Control Number
2003113659

CONTENTS

Photographer’s Note

Writer’s Note

The Battle of Gettysburg

66 Verses with Images

Writer’s Biography

Photographer’s Biography

Index of Images

PHOTOGRAPHER’S NOTE

WE ARE MET ON A GREAT BATTLEFIELD

By Chris Heisey

On July 4, 1863, the heavens began to pour upon the meadows and rocky ridges surrounding Gettysburg as a series of violent thunderstorms pummelled the small Pennsylvania town. The rain lasted for days, leading many to surmise that the torrents were God’s tears of sadness, and that the thunder was his rage.

I made my first trip to Gettysburg when I was an eight-year-old boy; it was also raining that June day in 1972. I lived only an hour north of the hallowed battlefield, so I thought the trip was no great journey. Yet sloshing about the battlefield with my parents as Tropical Storm Agnes deluged the killing fields was intensely memorable. I remember feeling a sense of awe, and it hasn’t left me since. Some 30 years later, the sheer magnitude of the carnage continues to strike me with wonder. I grew up in a town with a population of 25,000 bordered by a rival town with the same demographics. The horrific bloodletting is staggering to imagine — more than 50,000 soldiers, blue and gray, fell as battlefield casualties during the three-day battle of Gettysburg on July 1 – 3, 1863. Every one of my neighbors would have been killed, wounded or captured.

Despite the immensity of death, Gettysburg is a place blessed with monumental beauty. The historic landscape rolls with emotion and speaks to you if you take the time to listen. Dotting the sacred battleground are some 1,400 monuments that serve as testaments to the sacrifice so freely given that July long ago. Gettysburg is the home of the world’s largest outdoor sculpture display, and, like no other place in the world, this place stirs the soul.

Upon returning a few years after the battle, one veteran who had faced death remarked while looking out on the battlefield, “This is holy ground.” Amen.

The same year that I made my inaugural pilgrimage to Gettysburg, I had an engaging second-grade teacher who whetted my mind for learning about history. There at Palmyra’s Pine Street Elementary School — a place that still stands now as it did then — Mrs. Sohlman encouraged me to read and write. I vividly remember thinking about the Civil War there in my small classroom, sitting next to my best friend as a gentle February snow innocently blanketed the playground just outside the windows. On the bulletin boards across the room hung two boldly colored pictures of Washington and Lincoln. Early on, Lincoln became my hero because of his perfect imperfectness. Never in my mind has there ever been a better writer than Lincoln.

Lincoln came to Gettysburg some four months after the battle in the browns of November to dedicate the cemetery where thousands were buried — many with the marker “Unknown U.S. Soldier.” It seems such a pity to die without one’s name or identity. The very thought scared Lincoln.

“We are met on a great battlefield,” Lincoln tells us in his famous address delivered there in the National Cemetery. When I first heard those words at Pine Street Elementary, I wondered to myself what those words really meant. What was President Lincoln telling me, the little boy?

Oftentimes growing up, I strayed from learning more about the Civil War, but the war was always close to my heart. One year on my birthday, a kind neighbor gave me The Golden Book of the Civil War, which sparked my interest in learning. The book’s colorful maps and striking artwork dazzled my eye and touched my heart. Hundreds of times, I have leafed through that dusty book. My love of books began with this simple but profound book. Today, the book’s binding is duct-taped together, and it has that distinct smell that only a heavily used book has. My son now pages through that book just as I did. Books matter.

When I was a teen, I played sports and dreaded doing homework. But when something related to the Civil War came on television, I paid attention. Off to college I went with hardly a clue as to what the will of my life was to be. I wrote only one term paper in college, and it was entitled “Slavery: The Cause of the Civil War.” I wasn’t an “A” student by any stretch, but I earned one for that paper because I researched and wrote from my heart. I have never forgotten that valuable lesson.

I graduated in 1986 still searching for my place in this world. Days after graduation, my mother bought me a 35mm SLR camera from Sears and for us that was a big expense. That camera, however simple, taught me how to see rather than just look. Saint Matthew aptly tells us in his Gospel, “The eye is the lamp of the body. So if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light.” Seeking good light has always been my keenest desire as an image taker.

In 1990, on a number of chilly September nights, I watched Ken Burns’ PBS Civil War documentary. I was enthralled by the visual presentation and if there has ever been a finer use of television, I have not seen it. I especially appreciated the dramatic cinematography that caught the battlefields in such telling and evocative light. Union Colonel Joshua Chamberlain of the 20th Maine had it right when he said, “In great deeds something abides. On great fields something stays … . Men and women from generations that know not, heart drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them, shall come to this deathless field to ponder and dream. On a great battlefield something still abides.”

With that in mind’s eye, I set out at 4:00 a.m. a few days after watching the Burns series, making the hour’s drive to Gettysburg. Getting up early was a small sacrifice, as I was conditioned young in life to awake early by a father who was and still is a milkman. In the joy of summer, I would travel with him and enjoy the majesty of the rising sun and the new dawn those rays serenely brought forth.

When I arrived on the battlefield, the air was delicately crisp as the sun began to brighten the eastern sky. I was amazed as the hues of the sky changed with every moment. My camera was loaded with Kodachrome 25, and as I tripped the shutter silhouetting an artillery piece against the auburn sky, my heart pounded in my chest. “Every child is an artist,” Picasso once said, adding, “the problem is how to remain an artist once one grows up.”