In 1964, my family went on a 2 week camping trip. We journeyed from Wisconsin to Washington D.C. and back. We visited many sites over the course of those two weeks. The first place we stopped at was Gettysburg National Military Park where I fell off a cannon and developed a life-long interest in the American Civil War. Here is a picture of me on a cannon, just moments before I fell off of it.

This was taken on Kodachrome slide film with a pretty basic 35mm rangefinder camera. This was a popular way to record vacations back in those days. A few years ago I scanned all the surviving slides from that trip. At the time I scanned those slides, I did some investigation and figured out that the monument next to that cannon, is the monument to Thomas’s Battery, Battery C, of the 4th US Artillery, which was part of the Army of Potomac Artillery Reserve. The key to figuring out where the picture was taken was that there was another picture in this sequence taken of the Pennsylvania Memorial. The Pennsylvania Memorial is just across the road to the right of where this picture was taken.

This summer, as part of a long road trip, I stopped by Gettysburg for a few hours. I decided that I had to stop by the Thomas’s Battery Monument and take another picture. This is how this location looked like in the summer of 2021.

The area in front of the monument isn’t mowed, so I really couldn’t get a picture from the exact same angle, but this gives you an idea how the site looks like these days.