Ken Burns gets a taste of battle he chronicled
GETTYSBURG, Pa. — Filmmaker Ken Burns sits at a small table in a shuttered dining room built to re-create the evening of July 1, 1863. Two whale oil lamps cast a dim light. The floor boards shake from the sound of artillery outside.
A coffee cup is overturned on the table. Flashes of light from explosions come through the shutters and illuminate the dark.
It is the close of the first day of the Civil War’s Battle of Gettysburg, and public television’s renowned student of the war has come to imagine what it was like, not for the soldiers, but for the terrified residents as the conflict raged around them.
The location was the Adams County Historical Society’s new state-of-the-art museum that focuses on the experience of people as bullets flew through homes, buried themselves in mirror frames and bedsteads, and in one case killed a young woman while she was making bread.
Called “Gettysburg Beyond the Battle Museum,” it is located at a spot north of town where the Confederate army overran Union forces and stormed into Gettysburg on the first day of the three-day battle.
It is filled with images, accounts, and artifacts that show how the people of Gettysburg coped with the horror of the battle and its gruesome aftermath: a bullet-pocked store sign, a coffin maker’s saw, a comb taken from the body of Union soldier before his burial.
It displays a children’s anti-slavery book, torn apart by southern soldiers as they ransacked a home outside town.
And it includes the immersive “Caught in the Crossfire” room, with a disclaimer at the entrance that warns, “may be disturbing for some visitors.”
There, visitors can get a sense of what it might have been like for a besieged family as artillery shells shrieked overhead, windows shattered, and the lamps went out.
Bullets recovered from the battlefield are embedded in the exterior of one wall.
At the end of the four-minute, 30-second immersion, the voice of a rebel soldier announces, “Your Yankees have done run off. … This is our house now.”