In its third season, “Ticket to the Past: Unforgettable Journeys” at the historic Gettysburg Lincoln Railroad Station at 35 Carlisle Street offers an immersive trip into the past while stepping boldly toward the future of storytelling and museum design.
Designed by TimeLooper, Inc. — an Interpretive Experience Design firm located in New York City — the narrative-rich exhibit uses virtual and augmented reality to transport visitors to the chaos of 1863. There, inside the bustling 4-year-old train station at the Gettysburg stop of the western Terminus of the Gettysburg Railroad, you’ll meet face-to-face with your choice of one of three historic figures.

You’ll hear their stories and feel their emotions in the very spot where the first army field hospital opened the day before the Battle of Gettysburg began, where more than 15,000 wounded soldiers would be transported home or to care, and where crowds gathered on Nov. 18,1863 to greet President Abraham Lincoln on his way to deliver one of the most famous speeches in our nation’s history.
More than 160 years later, the quiet railroad tracks and platform appear to be resting between stops in downtown Gettysburg. Stepping inside one of the town’s most historic buildings, exhibit panels in the station’s lobby introduce you to three diverse figures from the Civil War era: Cornelia Hancock, a young nurse from New Jersey; Eli Blanchard, a volunteer soldier and musician from Michigan; and Basil Biggs, a Gettysburg resident and freedman.
In the first part of the exhibit, a guide helps you don goggles and headphones that will disconnect you from the present and propel you backward into virtual reality to meet the heroic figure that you have chosen.
Twenty-three-year-old Cornelia Hancock (my choice) is a volunteer with rosy cheeks who boards the train to Gettysburg from Philadelphia despite being turned away by the Superintendent of Nurses for being “too attractive.” Of the many heartbreaking challenges and hardships the determined young Quaker encounters, she describes writing letters home for the wounded soldiers as the most difficult.
(Cornelia so comforted Union soldiers that they named a dance tune “The Hancock Gallop” for her. Her own letters home are published in Letters of a Civil War Nurse: Cornelia Hancock 1863-1865 by Hunter Mack and Grace Vincent. After the war, she started a freedman school in South Carolina where she taught emancipated slaves for ten years before moving to Philadelphia and helping found the Children’s Aid Society of Pennsylvania.)
Eli Blanchard is an 18-year-old volunteer soldier and drummer from the Michigan Volunteer Infantry’s Iron Brigade. Surrounded by the horrors of battle, he comforts and entertains the wounded and assists in amputations at makeshift field hospitals including the Gettysburg Lincoln Railroad Station.
[Eli became ill in 1865 and was granted a sick furlough; he died at home shortly after the war ended. (See findagrave.com.)]
Basil Biggs is a freedman farmer who relocated with his wife and children from Baltimore, Md. (a slave state), to Gettysburg the year before the Gettysburg Lincoln Railroad Station was built. The Biggs family flees north when rebel forces invade in the summer of 1863 and return after the battle to find their home and all but two horses and a cart destroyed.
Biggs plays a major role in creating the Solders’ National Cemetery where he and other blacks are prohibited from being buried; he relocates (by horse and cart) and reburies more than 3,000 Union soldiers from their initial graves in Gettysburg and Hanover for $1.25 per corpse.
(The Peter Frey farm, which Biggs purchased with his earnings, still stands on Taneytown Road.)
The final part of this exhibition journey takes place in an adjacent room where projected images recreate and propel history forward into your physical space in augmented reality. The room fills with images of real actors, authentic Civil War photos, hospital scenes and even coffins. Hancock, Blanchard and Biggs make brief appearances, and a Station Master narrates.
“They are part of Gettysburg,” he says. “They are part of our history.”
You’ll join crowds gathering on the platform to catch a glimpse of Lincoln when he arrives and hear renowned film actor Stephen Lang recite the Gettysburg Address.
In less than an hour, the “Ticket to the Past: Unforgettable Journeys” exhibit partners with modern technology to take you, as it promises, on an unforgettable journey.
Other TimeLooper exhibits are bringing local history to life across the country – in Pearl Harbor at the Pearl Harbor National Memorial; in Birmingham, Ala., at the historic Bethel Baptist Church; in College Park, Md., at the College Park Aviation Museum; and in Prince George’s County, Md., at traveling locations with the Sankofa Project Mobile Interpretive Center.
The unnamed film actors featured at the Gettysburg exhibit merge seamlessly with their narratives; the actress who plays Cornelia is amazing.
Owned by the Gettysburg Foundation, the Gettysburg Lincoln Railroad Station is listed on the National Registry of Historic Places. “Ticket to the Past: Unforgettable Journeys” travels to the summer of 1863 via Gettysburg’s first virtual reality experience. Tickets run $7.95-9.95. For information, museum hours, and/or to purchase tickets, call 877-874-2478 or visit GettysburgFoundation.org/Ticket-to-the-Past.
Looking forward to seeing the exhibit this coming weekend upon our return having moved from Gettysburg nearly 3 years ago.