Eternal Light marks 80 years on Gettysburg battlefield
File – Worshippers attend a battlefield Easter sunrise service off of Confederate Avenue on March 27, 2016. The event was organized and hosted by the Gettysburg Presbyterian Church. (Clare Becker/The Evening Sun)
(Gettysburg) — As Gettysburg prepares to mark the 155th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, a monument on the battlefield will also be observing a special anniversary.
The Eternal Light Peace Memorial, located off Confederate Avenue, was dedicated 80 years ago in a ceremony attended by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who called the 47 1/2 foot tall obelisk “a shrine of American patriotism.” Before its unveiling, the monument was draped in a large American flag.
“All of them we honor,” Roosevelt said during his dedication speech, “not asking under which flag they fought then — thankful that they stand together under one flag now.”
At the top of the monument is a gas-fueled flame that was lit following Roosevelt’s address on the evening of July 3, 1938. According to Evening Sun archives, two veterans, aging into their nineties, together touched the device that lit the flame. One of the veterans fought for the Union, the other for the Confederates.
Related: Almost 100 years later, Gettysburg to honor last battlefield deaths
The dedication, which coincided with the 75th anniversary of the Battle, was attended by around 2,000 Civil War veterans and a crowd of at least 150,000 spectators spread over 40 acres, according to estimates given at the time by the state motor police.
Following the dedication, President Roosevelt boarded a train on the Western Maryland Railway, bound for Washington. On its way, the train traveled through Hanover where a crowd of between 1,500 and 2,000 people lined the tracks. President Roosevelt, seated at a window at the rear of the last car, smiled and waved to the crowd at the station and along the tracks.
“Many a Hanover child, and grown-ups, too, placed pennies on the tracks before the train arrived and quickly picked the flattened coins from the rails as soon as the train had passed, thus acquiring mementos of the occasion.” – The Evening Sun, July 5, 1938
Watch: President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicates the Eternal Light Peace Memorial in 1938
This story comes to us through a partnership between WITF and The Hanover Evening Sun.
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