Gettysburg College: In the Eye of the Battle

Gettysburg College sits at the northern edge of the Gettysburg battlefield, and in the first days of July eighteen sixty-three, the campus was in the middle of the fight.

The college was founded in eighteen thirty-two by Samuel Simon Schmucker, a Lutheran minister who believed the frontier needed educated clergy and teachers. It opened as the Theological Seminary of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, with a preparatory college attached. Schmucker named it Pennsylvania College. The school grew slowly through the eighteen forties and fifties, adding faculty, a modest library, and a few stone buildings, including Pennsylvania Hall, which stood at the highest point on campus.

When the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia converged on Gettysburg on July first, eighteen sixty-three, the college grounds became contested terrain within hours. The first day's fighting swept through the fields north and west of campus. As Union forces retreated through town late on July first, many sought cover in the college buildings. Pennsylvania Hall, the president's house, and several other structures were quickly converted into field hospitals.

For three days, surgeons operated on tables inside those rooms. Approximately fifteen hundred wounded soldiers, Union and Confederate, were treated on the campus. The bodies of the dead were laid out on the grass. Blood stained the floors of Pennsylvania Hall, and local legend holds that the stains could not be fully scrubbed out for years.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, after leaving the presidency, chose Gettysburg for his retirement. He bought a farm adjacent to the battlefield and maintained a close relationship with the college, delivering a commencement address there and participating in community events. The town and the campus had always been inseparable from the weight of those three July days.

Today Gettysburg College enrolls about twenty-five hundred students. Pennsylvania Hall still stands and still carries the name it carried in eighteen sixty-three.