Civil War Round table of Chicago November 2022 Meeting. The Nevins-Freeman Address: Mary Abroe on “Historic Preservation and Civil War Battlefields: An American Story”  

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Founded by Congress in August 1890, Chickamauga and  Chattanooga National Military Park is our first federal  battlefield park. Later that same month, passage of  legislation that set aside funding for preserving battle lines  and buying land to mark troop positions provided the  basis for what became Antietam National Battlefield Site.  Rounding out the five "granddaddies" that constitute the  nucleus of our national battlefield park network are Shiloh  (1894), Gettysburg (1895), and Vicksburg (1899). At a  time when there was no National Park Service as we  know it and only a few other "national parks"--like Yellowstone and Yosemite, both of which were western wilderness parks--the Civil War preserves of the 1890s set the precedent for all national historical parks (of whatever designation) going forward. As a result, those turn-of-the-century military establishments are among the premier historical properties of the entire National Park System. Additional Civil War sites joined their predecessors over the next 120-plus years, but  whether we consider Chickamauga or Mill Springs (KY)--in 2020 the most recent addition to the System--the immediate thought for many, if not most, is "killing fields." And so they were. But, over time, as men and women lived, worked, and remembered on those grounds, layers of human motives and actions also shaped them. In that way,  preserved battlefields have plenty to reveal about Americans' understanding of the Civil War and their resulting urge to preserve its sites as memorials, patriotic symbols, tourist destinations, documentary evidence, and outdoor classrooms. The battlefields also are  full of stories about local communities, whose people, through no choice of their own, became witnesses to history and neighbors of the places where it happened. This presentation focuses on what modern Civil War parks tell us about their meaning and preservation at the hands of successive generations of Americans, ourselves included--those who, over the decades between the 1890s and the early twenty-first century, have continued to shape those landscapes. 

Mary Abroe holds a BA in history from St. Mary's College, Notre Dame, Indiana and a PhD from Loyola University Chicago. She is retired from teaching at the College of Lake County in Grayslake, Illinois. Dr. Abroe is vice chair of the Board of Trustees of the American Battlefield Trust and a director of the Save Historic Antietam Foundation. She also is past president of the Civil War Round Table of Chicago.