It was a small town of about three thousand people, in
middle Pennsylvania, but ten or twelve miles north of the
Maryland line.
It was in the middle of a fertile and picturesque country.
To the west, sloping over the rising ridges of well cultivated farms, and to the, east, a broken land of rocky ridges and small cove-shaped mountains of rudely broken stone.
On the western slopes are the
College and the Theological Seminary, which give character somewhat to the town.
Quiet and retired, no one in
Gettysburg dreamed of any coming battle, nor of the pathetic and undying fame that would come to the peaceful place.
Neither
General Lee nor
General Meade ever thought of making it a battlefield, nor that its village cemetery would be the centre of a greater city of the dead, and the burying place of the hopes of a new Confedercy of the States of the
South.
