Recently opened in downtown Gettysburg’s beautifully preserved train station, the Gettysburg Foundation’s “Ticket to the Past: Unforgettable Journey” is a wonderful and life-changing virtual reality experience that can give visitors a glimpse into the future of engagement of museum visitors with history.
“Ticket to the Past” is more like a series of face-to-face encounters than a traditional museum tour from exhibit to exhibit.
Gettysburg’s first virtual reality experience promises to expand your imagination, awareness, understanding and empathy – and perhaps even boost your civic awareness, courage and involvement.
There, at 35 Carlisle Street, the same station where President Lincoln came to town from Hanover and Hanover Junction (Seven Valleys) on the Hanover Rail Corporation line in November 1863 to deliver the famous Gettysburg Address, you come face-to-face to one of three extraordinary individuals of that era.
Choose either Basil Biggs, described as a freedom fighter, enabler for the dead, and pursuer of unfinished business; Cornelia Hancock, military nurse, hospital hero and dedicated social worker; or Eli Blanchard, teenage volunteer, Iron Brigade gang member and amputation assistant.
Thanks to virtual reality glasses, your character tells you his story before, during and after the Battle of Gettysburg, from July 1 to 3, 1863.
I chose Gettysburg freedman, farmer, teammate (driver of an animal team), self-taught horse veterinarian, exhumation/exhumation specialist, civic leader and Underground Railroad conductor Basil Biggs (1819 -1906), which also has ties to Hanover; a famous and one-of-a-kind photograph; and York County.
The actor’s performance as Mr. Biggs was intense and moving.
Dome:York’s tiny tram station stood in the center of the center
Biggs, an illiterate freedman born to mixed-race parents in a Quaker settlement in Carroll County, Maryland, lost his mother when he was just four years old.
He was a master multitasker, a hardworking jack-of-all-trades. Throughout his life, Dr. Biggs, as he became known, made the best of every situation with relentless energy and perseverance.
Basil and his wife Mary Jackson moved their growing family from Baltimore, Maryland, a slave state, to the Free State of Pennsylvania in 1858 so that their children could be educated and grow up in freedom. At this time, black people in Maryland—whether free or enslaved—were denied public education.
According to his 1906 obituary, while a farmer at the Crawford Farm in Gettysburg, Biggs was an active agent in the Underground Railroad. According to historian Debra Sandoe McClausin, Biggs directed freedom seekers to the farm of black freedman and Quaker Edward Mathews in Biglerville, Adams County.
As more than 6,000 Confederates invaded Pennsylvania in the summer of 1863, the Biggs family fled northeast through York County to the town of Columbia on the banks of the Susquehanna River.
When the family returned to town after the epic Battle of Gettysburg, the turning point of the Civil War, everything Biggs owned was stolen or destroyed except for three possessions: two horses and a cart. They also returned to find 45 dead Confederates buried in the fields they farmed and cultivated.
According to the National Park Service, “The Biggs family lost eight cows, seven steers, ten pigs, eight tons of hay, ten tubs of apple butter, sixteen chairs, six beds, and ninety-two acres of crops.”
After the battle, teamster Biggs’ salvaged wagon, which could carry up to nine bodies at a time, came in handy as he embarked on a macabre, putrid, and daunting undertaking.
Working for Gettysburg merchant Samuel Weaver to exhume more than 3,000 dead Union soldiers from their original graves and relocate and rebury them in a central location, Biggs played a major role in establishing the National Soldiers’ Cemetery.
From October 1863 to March 1864, Biggs earned $1.25 for every corpse brought to his final resting place, including Union corpse transport from Hanover, 14 miles away. As a famous photo from Hannover shows. Biggs hired several black men from Gettysburg to do the job.
Biggs used his earnings to purchase his own farm, the Peter Frey Farm, which still stands on Taneytown Road, and around 120 acres of land. Some included the famous grove of trees, known as the High Watermark of the Confederacy at Cemetery Ridge, a must visit for battlefield tourists.
In 1881, Biggs sold these witness trees and the seven acres surrounding them to the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association for $1,350.
Ironically, although Biggs played a leading role in establishing the Soldiers’ National Cemetery, he and other black people, including the 30 local Civil War veterans of United States Colored Troops, did not were not buried there and at nearby Evergreen Cemetery, a civilian cemetery, because of systemic segregation.
Founder and prominent member of the Sons of Good Will, formed to acquire land for black cemeteries, Biggs is buried in the cemetery the Sons of Good Will established in 1866. Since 1906, the year Biggs died and is there been buried it known as Lincoln Cemetery.
It is on the outskirts of town in Gettysburg’s Third Ward, where most of Gettysburg’s African Americans lived at that time.
Your “Ticket to the Past” tour ends with a view of President Abraham Lincoln’s train arriving at Gettysburg from Hanover aboard a Hanover Railroad train on November 18, 1863. The next day, in “A Few Appropriate Remarks” by Lincoln dedicating the Soldiers’ National Cemetery that Biggs helped create, the nation’s 16th Commander-in-Chief proclaimed a ‘new birth of freedom’.
The narrator then ends your tour with an open challenge to honor the dead, freedom seekers, healers, and rebuilders of that time in our lives today.
“Ticket to the Past” is a bold, family-friendly, state-of-the-art, immersive, service-calling visitor experience you don’t want to miss.
Warning: Do not point your VR headset downward; your legs and feet won’t be there! But if you take the tour, you’re sure to be steeped in a good story and a moving experience.
Matthew Jackson lives in Hanover.
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