Hanover Junction: Lincoln's Stop on the Way to Gettysburg

On November eighteenth, eighteen sixty-three, a special train carrying Abraham Lincoln and his party passed through this junction. They were on their way to Gettysburg, where Lincoln would deliver the address dedicating the new National Cemetery the following day.

But Hanover Junction had already been living with the weight of Gettysburg for months. Earlier that same year, wounded soldiers from the battlefield were transported through here on their way to hospitals across the country. The junction also served as a key node on the Military Telegraph line, the network that let Lincoln monitor battlefield developments in near-real time from Washington. For a short while on that November evening, the man who depended on those telegraph wires passed through the very place where they ran, heading toward the cemetery that held the soldiers whose deaths had made the address necessary.