Washington Post
Michael Ruane
March 11, 2023
GETTYSBURG, Pa.
Filmmaker Ken Burns sits at a small table in a shuttered dining room built to re-create the evening of July 1, 1863. Two whale oil lamps cast a dim light. The floor boards shake from the sound of artillery outside.
A coffee cup is overturned on the table. Flashes of light from explosions come through the shutters and illuminate the dark.
It is the close of the first day of the Civil War’s Battle of Gettysburg, and public television’s renowned student of the war has come to imagine what it was like, not for the soldiers, but for the terrified residents as the conflict raged around them.
The location was the Adams County Historical Society’s new state-of-the-art museum that focuses on the experience of people as bullets flew through homes, buried themselves in mirror frames and bedsteads, and in one case killed a young woman while she was making bread.
Called the Gettysburg Beyond the Battle Museum, it is located at a spot north of town where the Confederate army overran Union forces and stormed into Gettysburg on the first day of the three-day battle…