The Battle of Gettysburg was the high-water mark of the Confederacy, as General Robert E. Lee marched northward through the Shenandoah Valley with designs on penetrating deep into Pennsylvania.
Over the course of three days, Union and Confederate armies suffered between 46,000 and 51,000 casualties, making Gettysburg the most costly battle in U.S. history.
The relatively new technology of still photography allowed people to witness the horrors of war on a large scale for the first time, but the ability to capture these soldiers in motion did not exist, and would not exist for another generation.
Seventy-five years after the Battle of Gettysburg, the surviving members on both sides of the Civil War gathered on the battlefield one last time.
From July 1 to July 5 of 1938, nearly 2,000 Civil War veterans—including around 25 from the battle itself–descended on Gettysburg, Pennsylvania for the 75th anniversary of the battle, this time encamped together, sharing the battlefield not in conflict, but in remembrance.
Louisville resident Ron Crimm, now in his 80s and retired from the Kentucky state legislature, where he served for 20 years, was just three-years-old when his father took him to the 1938 reunion to get a first-hand account of an historic generation that was quickly fading away.
“My dad just thought it was important that I be exposed to this thing. And as it ends up it was important. It was very important. I’m thrilled to be able to say I shook hands with men who fought in the Civil War,/” Crimm said.
By this time, motion picture technology had progressed to the point where people could buy a hand-held movie camera, and Crimm’s father had one–an 8mm Keystone. He took the camera along with him to capture the Civil War veterans in action as they returned to the battlefield. The resulting film had been forgotten in storage for years, until Ron and his wife Phyllis rediscovered it during a recent move.
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