Lisa Gregory 
Suddenly, right before her eyes three long-dead children from a different time appeared. Children that no one else could see. “They were beside the tour guide,” recalls Felicia Rizzo, who was visiting the National Soldiers’ Orphans’ Homestead in Gettysburg. “They looked dirty and were in rags.” While their image was unsettling, what they communicated to
For a moment it became very real for him. Actor Alfonso Freeman was filming a scene for the upcoming movie, Gettysburg 1863, playing Basil Biggs, a Black man who lived near Gettysburg at the time of the battle and was a conductor for the Underground Railroad. In the scene, Freeman as Biggs was encouraging runaway
Jonathan (Jon Jon) Pinkerton had only requested a few signed photographs from actor Stephen Lang, but he ended up getting so much more. “It came in a big box,” says Pinkerton, an avid collector of memorabilia from the movie Gettysburg. He dug into the tissue paper and to his surprise there it was. “The uniform
A week before she died in 1980, Verlyn Mason’s grandmother, who was originally from Gettysburg, sat down at the kitchen table, tore a piece of paper off a five-pound bag of sugar, and wrote down a list of family names. That list would put Mason on a journey into her own past. “She had never
A stop on the Underground Railroad and a refuge for Black residents during the Battle of Gettysburg, the town of Yellow Hill was once a thriving community in Adams County’s Butler Township. Then it was gone — but not forgotten. “I think the Yellow Hill community is crucial in telling the story of the making
As a history-loving little boy, Gettysburg History President and CEO Andrew Dalton couldn’t have imagined it. “There I was sitting in a room with Ken Burns, Martin Sheen, and Susan Eisenhower,” says Dalton. Burns is the world-renowned filmmaker whose works include the groundbreaking documentary The Civil War. Sheen is an actor whose roles have included
Gettysburg resident Mike Chandler has lived with military PTSD all of his life. First, as a little boy, he saw his father struggle with it. Now, as an adult with children of his own, he himself is struggling with it. In an effort to help others better understand the impact of PTSD on those who
President Dwight D. Eisenhower wasn’t much interested in seeing himself on the screen in films about World War II. After all, he had been there, done that. And in the process, as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, he had preserved democracy. “I remember being at the farm and my brother David
Rafael Mejia was just four years old when he and his infant sister were kidnapped. “A guy had asked my mom to dance at a party, and she told him no,” says Mejia. So, the disgruntled would-be dance partner took Rafael and his sister, traumatizing the little boy. “When my mother found me, I was
Perhaps no one was more surprised than Martin Sheen when he got the call to play General Robert E. Lee for the movie Gettysburg. “I thought I’d be the last guy,” says Sheen, chuckling. “And I’ve always suspected and I’m going to have to ask Ron Maxwell (Gettysburg director) to be straight with me someday