Gettysburg: The 75th Pennsylvania and the Commonwealth's Monument Fund

After the war, the survivors of the Seventy-Fifth Pennsylvania Infantry did what thousands of veterans across the North did: they raised money and built a monument on the ground where they had fought.

But then something unusual happened. In the eighteen eighties, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania allocated state funds specifically to erect monuments at Gettysburg for Pennsylvania regiments. The Seventy-Fifth took advantage of that funding and built a second, larger monument, dedicated in eighteen eighty-eight.

The result is that the regiment is marked twice on the battlefield, which is itself a small window into how seriously Pennsylvanians took the preservation of Gettysburg's memory. The state poured enormous resources into the battlefield in those years, resulting in the extraordinary density of monuments you see today, more than thirteen hundred across the park. Pennsylvania effectively decided that Gettysburg would be remembered, in stone, regiment by regiment.