CWI Summer Conference Tours

CWI 2027 Conference Tours

Saturday, June 12, 2 pm – 8:45 pm & Sunday, June 13, 9 am – 5 pm

Active Track Tour:  The Union Army’s 3rd Corps at Gettysburg (Timothy Orr, Old Dominion University)

Gettysburg enthusiasts, fall in and join Dr. Timothy J. Orr for a two-day, sixteen-hour walking tour that will cover the history of the Army of the Potomac’s Third Corps. This two-day program will follow in the footsteps of the officers and men of the Third Corps, focusing on their defense of the Union left flank. It will examine the history of the controversial corps commander, Maj. Gen. Dan Sickles, and his decision to occupy the Emmitsburg Road. It will also discuss the combat that occurred at Devil’s Den, the Slyder Farm, the Rose wheat field, the Sherfy Peach Orchard, and the Klingel and Rogers farmsteads. This tour will involve moderate- to advanced-level hiking. It will primarily follow roads and trails, but on a few instances, it will traverse rocky areas. Most stops will be in the shade, but a few will be in the sun. Please prepare accordingly. Wear appropriate clothing, bring water, bring sun protection, and bring insect repellent. If you’re ready to deliver your loudest Yankee “huzzah!” then don your finest Kearny Patch and come join us for the CWI’s 2027 “active track” package: The Third Corps at Gettysburg.

Saturday, June 12, 5:45 – 8:45 pm

"The Federal Army was cut in twain:” The 21st Mississippi in Barksdale's July 2nd Charge (Dan Welch, Gettysburg National Military Park)

J.S. McNeily, a member of the 21st Mississippi, wrote years after the war that despite the charge of his regiment and Gen. William Barksdale's brigade being "largely eclipsed [as] it has been in historic narratives," memories of the afternoon of July 2 still "quickens the pulsation of old blood, to recall the thrills of that matchless ‘rush to glory or the grave.’” The charge of this Mississippi regiment not only penetrated the furthest into the Union lines of their brigade but also captured more pieces of Federal cannon than any other Confederate regiment that day. Follow these men in history and memory as we walk in their footsteps once more.   The program will begin at the Mississippi monument, near Auto Tour Stop 6. Parking will be on West Confederate Avenue in designated parking areas. Walking for the program will be over two miles in length, over rolling ground, in tall grass, and along roadways. Once leaving the first program location, there will be no shade. This will be a rigorous walking program, following as closely as possible to the route of the charge of the 21st Mississippi. 

In the Footsteps of a Regiment: The 12rth New York at Devil’s Den (Pete Vermilyea, Housatonic Valley Regional High School & Mike Rupert, Licensed Battlefield Guide)

Follow in the footsteps of the 124th New York, the “Orange Blossoms,” as they fight to hold the left end of Sickles’s salient at Houck’s Ridge above Devil’s Den. On some of the most famous ground at Gettysburg, the regiment faced soldiers from Texas, Arkansas and Georgia in a brutal, back-and-forth struggle of charges and countercharges. This tour retraces the Orange Blossoms’ path across the rocky slopes and fields where the battle surged. The words of the soldiers will serve as our guide, revealing what these soldiers saw, heard, and experienced amid the smoke, noise, and confusion of battle. Come walk the ground with the men who fought there - and see Gettysburg through their eyes.This tour includes about a mile and a half of walking, some over uneven ground.

Hidden In Plain Sight: Gettysburg Through the Eyes of the Enslaved Men Who Marched With Robert E. Lee (Kevin Levin, Independent Historian)

Thousands of enslaved men marched north with the Army of Northern Virginia during the Gettysburg Campaign, serving as teamsters, hospital attendants, and above all as body servants attached to the infantry, artillery, and cavalry. Their labor sustained the army at every turn, yet their presence has been almost entirely written out of how we remember this battle. This tour recovers that presence. Rather than following the campaign through the eyes of generals and soldiers, we will trace each day of the battle through the experiences of specific enslaved men who were there. At every stop we will focus on one individual, using the fragments of evidence that survive about him to reconstruct what he likely did, what he witnessed, and how he made sense of the violence unfolding around him. Together these stops build a narrative of the battle unlike any other available on this battlefield, one told from below rather than from headquarters. We will close at the Virginia and North Carolina monuments, two of the battlefield's grandest memorials, to ask a harder question. How did men who marched into Pennsylvania as part of these very units disappear so completely from the stories these monuments tell? Tracing that erasure will show how Civil War memory was built, whose experience it privileged, and what recovering these lost figures can teach us about the battle and the war it was part of.  This tour will involve light walking.

Meade’s Repulse of Pickett’s Charge (Carol Reardon, Pennsylvania State University)

This program will examine the U.S. Army defenses on Cemetery Ridge where the major Confederate attack on July 3--best known as Pickett's Charge--focused its power. This event will require approximately one mile of walking, not all at one time, on paved roads and mowed grassy areas. 

Seminary Ridge Sampler: The Seminary Ridge Museum, the Historic Cupola, and Lee’s Headquarters (Codie Eash, Seminary Ridge Museum and Education Center)

Seminary Ridge Museum, housed in iconic Schmucker Hall on the campus of the Lutheran Seminary, interprets the first day of the battle, one of Gettysburg’s most significant military hospitals, and the Civil War era’s social debates that raged inside this building and tore apart the nation. Here, visitors can walk in the footsteps of men and women who shaped the course of 19th-century Gettysburg history, before, during, and long after the Battle of Gettysburg. Join Codie Eash, Director of Education and Interpretation, for a tour of this eminent structure and its exhibits, a view from its famed cupola, and a trek across its often-underappreciated surrounding grounds.

Sunday, June 13, 1 pm – 4 pm:

Using the Gettysburg Battlefield in the Classroom: An Overview Tour (Peter Vermilyea, Housatonic Valley Regional High School & Jared Peatman, Four Score Consulting and the George Washington University Center for Excellence in Public Leadership)

This tour will explore the 3 days of fighting at Gettysburg and the battle’s broader historical significance, with an emphasis on how K-12 educators might discuss place-based history in the classroom. Led by a veteran high-school history teacher and a faculty member from the George Washington University Center for Excellence in Public Leadership, this tour is crafted to include open discussion and dialogue between current teachers and the guides as we discuss Gettysburg in history and memory from an educator’s perspective. 

Monday, June 14, 9 am – 5:00 pm

Full Day Tour:  “Towards the Susquehanna”: The Battle of Wrightsville in History and Memory (Peter Miele, Susquehanna National Heritage Area)

This tour will bring visitors to the banks of the Susquehanna River, where they will learn about the fight for a critical bridge crossing three days before the Battle of Gettysburg. During this short battle, Confederates came up against the only organized group of Black troops in the Gettysburg Campaign. Participants will get to visit the historic Mifflin Farm, a recently preserved Underground Railroad site and the only undeveloped portion of the Wrightsville battle. This tour will include some light walking. 

Monday, June 15, 9 am – 5:00 pm

Hybrid tours: 

Freedom Lies Just North: The Underground Railroad in Adams County’s Quaker Valley (Debra Sandoe McCauslin, Independent Historian & Cooper Wingert, Fordham University)

Before the Civil War Gettysburg’s African Americans worked with Quaker neighbors to bring more than a thousand slaves to freedom. See Yellow Hill, where African-American families refuged during the 1863 Confederate invasion. Sit in an 1880s Quaker Meetinghouse. Visit sites along the National Network to Freedom. This hybrid tour will begin in the field, and require very little walking. The afternoon classroom session will explore the larger history of slavery in Adams County, the development of an Underground Railroad Network within the area, and the free Black community within Adams County.

The Impact of Weather on the Gettysburg Campaign (Jeffrey Harding, Licensed Battlefield Guide, and Jon Nese, Penn State University)

Join this action-packed hybrid experience to learn how the Weather Gods influenced and shaped the Gettysburg Campaign! The program includes a morning classroom session detailing new discoveries pertaining to the actual weather circumstances that haunted the armies during the entire campaign. After lunch the group will join together outdoors to measure and record weather data in methods similar to those used by Smithsonian sanctioned weather observers like Gettysburg’s Professor Michael Jacobs. Participants will compare and contrast these methods with the modern meteorological devices used to gather weather data today. Attendees will then embark on a unique battlefield tour where they will visit each day’s field (days 1-3) to discuss how weather impacted the soldiers and examine how the elements, especially the worse than previously understood heat-related circumstances, shaped key episodes of the battle!

Carl Schurz, German Americans, and the XI Corps at Gettysburg (Heath Anderson, Wright State University)

On the afternoon of July 1, Maj. Gen. Carl Schurz led the soldiers of the largely German American XI Corps north of Gettysburg to confront an uncertain Confederate threat. Within hours, the corps’ battered soldiers retreated en masse through Gettysburg, their collapse reinforcing a stereotype born at Chancellorsville: the “Dutch won’t fight.” Yet this narrative obscures another, more compelling story of these men’s sacrifices. For immigrant officers like Carl Schurz, Francis Mahler, Thomas Krzyzanowski—and many of the men they led—their fight against a superior enemy was not a doomed prelude to more glorious episodes, but a determined stand to defend the American Union and its ideal of free government. 

This tour follows in the footsteps of the men of the XI Corps on July 1. From the opening situation on Cemetery Hill to the collapse of their positions on Barlow’s Knoll and present-day Howard Avenue, and their subsequent retreat, we will consider both how and why these Union soldiers stood their ground against overwhelming odds. Pivoting to the classroom, we will examine the interconnected stories of the corps’ officers and men, particularly through Carl Schurz and others’ participation in the failed democratic revolutions of 1848. By placing their service within a global struggle between republican self-government and aristocracy, we will explore why they believed the promise of America itself was on the line on July 1, 1863. The tour will involve very light walking, mostly along the tour road.

After a lunch break, participants will gather in the classroom for a discussion expanding upon the relationships between the officers and men encountered during the battlefield walk, particularly through the experiences of immigrant soldiers who participated in or fled Europe after the failed revolutions of 1848. Specifically, this discussion will examine how they understood the American Civil War as a contest between a self-governing republic based on freedom, merit, and individual value and an aristocratic society rooted in hierarchy and slavery. 

Stories in Stone: Selected Gettysburg Monuments and Their Hidden Tales (Dana Shoaf & Melissa Winn, National Museum of Civil War Medicine)

Gettysburg monuments tell stories that extend beyond the regiments and individuals they commemorate. The classroom discussion and tour takes a deeper look at selected monuments across the battlefield to uncover the fascinating, and sometimes complicated, stories behind their creation. Using dedication speeches, veteran letters and photographs, regimental histories, newspaper accounts, and records preserved in the Gettysburg Battlefield files, we’ll explore why these monuments were erected, how their designs and locations were chosen, and what veterans hoped they would say to future generations. While some monuments and dedication ceremonies reflected a growing spirit of reconciliation between former enemies, the words of the veterans themselves reveal that old wounds and wartime animosities did not always disappear so easily. Join us as we uncover the people, controversies, and hidden stories behind some of Gettysburg’s most absorbing monuments. This tour will require some light walking.