The world will little note...

I've been sharing "favorite apron" stories the last few days, but today my blog is in honor of a young woman of 20, Jennie Wade, who wore an apron while making bread in her sister's kitchen.  Her sister had just given birth and Jennie was at her sister's home helping out, when a bullet entered through the kitchen door and made Jennie the Battle of Gettysburg's only civilian fatality.

 Mary Virginia (Jennie) Wade statue outside the home where she was killed

Yesterday was the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's Gettysburg. Address, and in honor of Jennie, and all the brave young men who died on those horrible three days in July, 1863, here are some pictures from the battlefield when we toured it in May of this year.  God bless them all.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

My husband's family take their last name from the Scales Plantation in Madison, NC.  The plantation owner's son formed this brigade from his county.  We've had the opportunity to visit the plantation and the Scales family cemetery and were amazed to find this memorial at Gettysburg.  "All men are created equal" was a principle worth fighting for.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.

Scenes from the diorama inside the new Visitors Center

It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain

that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.