Civil War Round Table is on Gettysburg Reunion of 1913

The next Wayne County Civil War Round Table program will be held Aug. 20 at 6:30 p.m.

The CWRT, which is free and open to the public, will meet at the Wayne County Historical Society schoolhouse, 546 E. Bowman St., Wooster. The program will be given by John L. Hopkins on the Gettysburg Reunion of 1913.

Hopkins, a life member of the WCHS, is winning praise for his first book, “The World Will Never See the Like: The Gettysburg Reunion of 1913,” which The Wall Street Journal calls a compelling, poignant and sometimes heartbreaking account of the biggest gathering of the Blue and Gray since the Civil War.

The 1913 Gettysburg reunion is a story of 53,000 old comrades and former foes reunited and of the tension, even half a century later, between competing narratives of reconciliation and remembrance. For seven days the old soldiers lived under canvas in the stifling heat on a 280-acre encampment run by the U.S. Army. They swapped stories, debated still-simmering controversies about the battle and fed tall tales to gullible reporters. On July 3 the aging survivors of Pickett’s Division and the Philadelphia Brigade shook hands across the wall on Cemetery Ridge in the reunion’s climactic photo op.

With detail from the letters, diaries and published accounts of Union and Confederate veterans; the archival records of the reunion’s organizers; and the daily stories filed by the scores of reporters who covered it, “The World Will Never See the Like” offers the first full story of this event’s genesis and planning, the obstacles overcome on the way to making it a reality, its place in the larger narrative of sectional reunion and reconciliation, and the individual stories of the veterans who attended.

For the event there is parking onsite — enter from the Spink Street entrance — and along the fence in the Drug Mart parking lot. For more information about the Wayne County Historical Society, visit waynehistoricalohio.org.

For questions call Penny Gasbarre at 330-845-3069 or email her at pennygasbarre@gmail.com.