Monday, August 17, 2009

The Ex-Gettysburg National Tower

I'm not sure if many other people out there in the world get as interested in stuff like this as I do, but I just found out that there used to be a great big tower on the battle ground that got knocked over in the year 2000. Some guy owned a bit of land adjacent to the National Military Park and thought it would be a great idea to build a 393 foot tower in 1974 and charge people to take a look around. Check out how terrible that thing looks! Its just hideous. As you might imagine, there was a load of controversy about the tower for years until the government finally paid the owner 3 million dollars and took ownership. During the anniversary of the battle in 2000 a guy dressed up like a Union soldier, and another guy dressed up like a Confederate soldier fired cannons at the tower (ceremoniously) and ten pounds of explosives brought the tower down. You can see footage of the demolition on Youtube and its pretty cool. That tower was gigantic, I mean the Church Office Building is only 20 feet taller. It might have been neat to have such a great view of the area, but I'm a much bigger fan of the "originality" that exists in the area now that the tower has come down. I could watch that destruction video over and over again...and I did.

I don't think it was built as a replacement to the 393-foot eyesore, but there is another tower that sits out in the battlefield now. After some time I was able to convince Sara to go with me to the top of the new tower to take a look around. It was pretty cool to be able to see Little Round Top, Big Round Top, Cemetery Ridge, and all the other sites from above. Mostly though, I just wanted to climb up the cool stairs and see how easy they were to fall off of. Check out this picture of Sara with Little and Big Round Top in the back ground. Holy Cow, I have so many good pictures from Gettysburg, I haven't even started talking about Little Round Top or the Gettysburg address. I'm still so amazed that we were fully entertained for a full day in the park, I hope that the pictures and the explanations thereof are interesting enough to keep you reading for a full five minutes.

1 comment:

*Aliese* said...

I LOVE all your cool stories! Seriously, I enjoy history, but am actually quite rubbish when it comes to searching and remembering stories/cool stuff like this.