On a Great Battlefield: The Making, Management, and Memory of Gettysburg National Military Park, 1933–2013 by Jennifer M. Murray (review)

Studies of Civil War commemoration have devoted little attention to the role of historic preservation in shaping how Americans imagine battlefields as sacred and commercial spaces. With On a Great Battlefield, Jennifer Murray offers an original approach to memory studies by focusing on the Gettysburg National Military Park and its caretakers’ philosophies of landscape preservation, park administration, and battlefield interpretation. She begins by examining the preservation efforts of the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association from 1864 to 1895, the battlefield’s establishment as a national military park in 1895 under the War Department, and its eventual transfer to the National Park Service (NPS) in 1933. None of the professional caretakers managed the battlefield as a fixed resource. Their visions, as Murray skillfully shows, were never implemented from the top down. Every superintendent of Gettysburg National Military Park has been caught in a maelstrom of competing political, economic, and local interests.

Murray excels at getting the reader to the ground level of the preservation and interpretive battles at Gettysburg without losing the broader political and social context in which these debates occurred. In the 1930s, for instance, Superintendent James McConaghie, who was a landscape architect by training, headed the transition from the War Department to the NPS, believing that the historic resource should be restored as a haven of scenic beauty. He appreciated the battle’s historical significance, but McConaghie was a company man when it came to the NPS. He wanted Gettysburg to emulate the spectacular natural parks of the West. Cultivating an aesthetic landscape was elemental to his designs. McConaghie thought there were too many monuments on the battlefield, and while they had meant something to the veterans, they were silent sentinels of marble, devoid of meaning. McConaghie decided that it would be better to obscure or deliberately hide the monuments from the public by planting more trees without any regard to the wartime appearance of the battlefield. The “enhancement” of the natural aesthetic of the park troubled the historians on McConaghie’s staff, who criticized the superintendent’s management philosophy as an act of historical apostasy. The Gettysburg guides, who were not NPS employees but who were under McConaghie’s authority, were also outraged when they received the following memo: “You are no longer concerned merely with this famous battlefield, but rather you are concerned with all of the other national parks in the country” (30).

In the end, McConaghie’s vision prevailed, largely because of the economic pressures of the Great Depression and the infusion of New Deal funds that spurred the transformation of Gettysburg from a memorial park—centered on the deeds of the soldiers—to a multiuse site geared toward expanding tourism. Murray refrains from judging the preservationist policies of McConaghie. Rather, she wants the reader to appreciate how broader shifts in American society presented time-specific challenges and philosophies to each NPS administration. The post–World War II auto boom pressured Gettysburg officials to make the fields more accessible to cars, a demand that weighs heavily upon the park today (Little Round Top has become a veritable parking garage). Cutting new roads carved up the historical landscape, but it improved accessibility. Murray sympathizes with Superintendent James W. Coleman (McConaghie’s successor), who was badgered by the Gettysburg Chamber of Commerce to do more to promote hotels, restaurants, and other commercial activities. Controlling modern development was not a new problem, and Coleman did his best to appease local businessmen who believed that the battlefield existed solely for their financial profit. At the same time, he purchased land under commercial threat and returned specific parts of the battlefield to its wartime appearance.

From the 1950s through the 1980s the park witnessed a steady increase in visitors who had the disposable income and the cars to make the pilgrimage to Gettysburg. Unfortunately, the NPS lacked...