Soldiers' National Cemetery

You've come down off Cemetery Ridge to Soldiers' National Cemetery, the ground most people here simply call the National Cemetery. Once you're parked and out of the car, look for the tall granite column at the center, the Soldiers' National Monument, 60 feet high. Now look at the ground around it. Low gray stones curve around that monument in rings, like ripples in a pond.

Those ripples were a choice. In 1863 a committee of Union governors selected a designer named William Saunders to lay out a cemetery for the Union dead. Saunders grouped the graves by state and marked them with simple, unadorned slabs of gray granite. Officers and enlisted men lie side by side, because the Union army was mostly citizen volunteers, and Saunders wanted the ground to say so. The repetition of simple, common things, he wrote, was meant to evoke solemnity.