Four score and seven years ago . ..

One can not walk the battlefields of Gettysburg without a personal reflection on the huge sacrifices and monumental importance of what happened here almost a century and a half ago. I truly felt a connection to the 51,000 soldiers who lost their lives or sacrificed a piece of their soul on this hallowed ground over the course of those three days in 1863.

Although I've been to Gettysburg several times over the years, it was not since I was a little kid that I walked the battlefield and stood on Little Round Top. It brought back some wonderful memories of the past and offered up a chance to create a few new ones. God Bless America.

See the rest of my images here and view the "best of" our entire group's here.


Below is the text of President Lincoln's Gettysburg Address given at the dedication of the National Cemetary.

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate...we can not consecrate...we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government: of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."