Gettysburg Battlefield Preservation Association

Founded, 1959 -- The nation’s oldest battlefield preservation organization

P.O. Box 4087, Gettysburg, PA 17325

NEWS RELEASE

Ribbon-cutting to open GBPA’s 33 York Street Museum

(Feb.28) Downtown Gettysburg will gain another attraction for visitors March 4 when the Gettysburg Battlefield Preservation Association launches its 33 York Street Museums in the first floor of the organization’s headquarters at 33 York Street East of the town square.

The brief ribbon-cutting at 4.p.m. Saturday, March 4 will precede a reception inside where punch and cookies will be served. The public is invited.

The ceremony is part of Reenactor’s Appreciation Weekend in Gettysburg, March 3, 4, and 5.

The weekend will feature special events such as, sales and programs relating to reenactment sponsored by the borough merchants. The museum will feature original objects relating to the 1863 battle, much of it centered on the treatment of soldiers cut down in desperate clashes in the fields, hills and orchards of Gettysburg.

The GBPA’s multi-faceted storefront headquarters at 33 York Street has taken on a new and expanded role. The storefront will provide information to Gettysburg visitors AND feature two FREE mini-museums:

Historical Artifacts pertaining to Civil War Medicine will be the prime focus of the first floor display, including artifacts relating to field hospitals, surgeons, nurses and civilian residents of the area who aided the dying and nearly 27,000 wounded during and after the Battle of Gettysburg.

The display also will include items associated with Camp Letterman – the Civil War’s largest field hospital ever erected in North America, and, where, for the first time in the war, soldiers of both sides were treated together. The camp closed in November of 1863 just prior to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The display contains original photos depicting the aftermath, surgical and amputation instruments, and numerous relics used at Gettysburg field hospitals and recovered from the fields that once held these historic sites.

Many of the artifacts are provided by the Union Drummer Boy, one of the nation’s premier historic artifact stores located across the street from the museum

                In addition, the museum will have a display that packs both sentiment and patriotism. Hundreds of photos of veterans who have served in the nation’s wars   beginning with the civil will cover many of the walls of the museum.

The collection originally accumulated on the walls of the Home Front General Store at its former location on Queen Street. The business recently relocated to 777 Baltimore Street, were the wall space could not adequately display the vast number of photographs, so they were moved to the GBPA Museum.

Also under consideration is a third mini-museum at 33 York that will focus on how local free blacks dealt with the surge of threatening Confederate troops into the village and how tens of thousands of blacks fought for the union during the second half of the war.

GBPA York Street Museum

Hours: Thursday through Monday

10 a.m. – 4 p.m.

(Dates and hours may be reduced during winter months)

Admission: FREE!

                                                     The GBPA has a website at www.gbpa.org.  

The Gettysburg Battlefield Preservation Association is a 501c3 nonprofit organization under the Internal Revenue Code and is registered as a charitable organization with the Pennsylvania Department of State, Bureau of Corporations and Charitable Organizations.   Contributions are tax deductible.