Gettysburg

James Gettys, son of the Irish settler Samuel Gettys, laid out the town in 1786 on his father's land at a crossroads in the fertile country north of the Maryland line, and it became the seat of the new Adams County in 1800. Roads converging on its square from many directions made it a market town for the surrounding farms, and in the 1830s two institutions gave it a second character: a Lutheran theological seminary, founded in 1826 and moved to the ridge west of town in 1832, and Pennsylvania College, now Gettysburg College, founded in 1832. A railway arrived in 1858, and the town had about 2,400 people.

Those converging roads brought the armies. In late June 1863 Robert E. Lee's Confederate army was moving through Pennsylvania, and on 1 July its advance met Union cavalry west of the town. Over three days the two armies fought across the ridges and fields south and west of Gettysburg, with the Union army under George Meade holding the high ground from Cemetery Hill to the Round Tops and repelling Pickett's Charge on 3 July. Roughly 50,000 men were killed, wounded or captured, the largest toll of any battle in the war, and the town became a vast hospital. One civilian, Jennie Wade, was killed. On 19 November Lincoln spoke for about two minutes at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery.

Veterans' associations began marking the field within a few years, regimental monuments followed from the 1880s, and the federal government took over the battlefield in 1895. Tourism has been the town's business ever since, growing with the automobile and with the Eisenhowers, who bought a farm beside the field in 1950. A new park museum opened in 2008. Today about 7,000 people live in the borough.

Gettysburg lives with history in a way few American towns do. Bullet scars remain in the brick of Baltimore Street, licensed battlefield guides lead visitors over the field, and reenactors in wool uniforms are an ordinary sight on the square. The town takes the battle seriously: the field and the cemetery are treated as sacred ground, the annual Remembrance Day in November is a civic event with a parade, and residents are patient with the many visitors who arrive each year.

Beneath the Civil War layer is a Pennsylvania Dutch and Scots-Irish county seat of long standing, with a courthouse, a Lutheran seminary that still trains ministers, and a liberal-arts college of about 2,100 students whose concerts, lectures and sports add to the town's life. Adams County is apple country, and the orchards' calendar — blossom in spring, harvest festival in autumn — matters as much to locals as the battle anniversary does to visitors. Local manners are small-town and courteous, politically more conservative than the college, and proud of the place without being solemn.

The town also has a lighter commercial culture of ghost tours, of souvenir shops and of family attractions on Steinwehr Avenue, which purists grumble about and most visitors enjoy. Civil War round tables, collectors and historians make Gettysburg a year-round centre of study, and the bookshops are unusually good for a town of its size.

About 7,000 people live in the borough of Gettysburg, with roughly 100,000 in Adams County; the college's students make up a large share of the town's population during term. Tourism — the park, the museums, hotels, restaurants and guiding — is the biggest employer alongside the college, the seminary, the county government and the hospital, and the county's orchards and farms employ many more; the town also has a growing Latino community.

The town is a tight grid of brick and frame houses around the square, with newer housing and most of the hotels, motels and chain restaurants along the approach roads, and with the battlefield fixing a hard edge to growth on the south and west. Residents commute to Hanover, York and Harrisburg as well as working locally.

Daily life has a strong seasonal pattern: summer and October weekends are crowded and parking is hard, while January is empty and the shops on the square are quiet. Tourist traffic through the historic centre, the balance between preservation and business, and the park's management of the field are the perennial local debates. Beyond them, it is an ordinary Pennsylvania county town of high-school football and church suppers.

The food is Pennsylvania Dutch and farm country, with the Civil War as decoration. Chicken pot pie here is a stew with thick homemade noodles and potatoes rather than a pastry pie; scrapple, chicken corn soup, shoofly pie and whoopie pies appear on diner and church-supper menus, and the county's orchards supply apple butter, cider, apple dumplings and pies from late summer, sold at farm markets along the roads north and west of town.

The Dobbin House, a stone house of 1776 and the oldest standing building in Gettysburg, is now a tavern and restaurant; several other inns and taverns around the square and on Baltimore Street trade on 18th- and 19th-century settings, and a brewery taproom and a handful of modern restaurants serve the college and the townspeople. Steinwehr Avenue has the family restaurants, ice cream and diners near the hotels, and the summer evening ritual is ice cream after a day on the field.

Drink runs to local craft beer, Adams County hard cider and wine from the vineyards of the orchard country. Nearby Hanover's snack factories mean Pennsylvania pretzels and potato chips are a point of local pride.