The new Gettysburg battlefield visitor center is opening just two weeks before the April 27 show. It replaces the long outdated visitor center adjacent to the national cemetery. Here is an interesting article on the "electric map" that many visitors may remember:
End is near for the iconic Electric Map
The plug is being pulled April 13 on the legendary Electric Map at Gettysburg National Military Park — the day before the new $105 million visitor center and museum opens along the Baltimore Pike. Battlefield leaders intend to store the map in a temporary facility until they resolve its long-term fate.
“We’re not taking it with us. It’s mechanically obsolete,” said Gettysburg National Military Park Supt. Dr. John A. Latschar. “It’s a decision that we made a while ago.”
More than 61 million people, according to federal statistics, have viewed the Electric Map, located at the present-day battlefield visitor center along the Taneytown Road, in the last seven decades. The map uses 625 Christmas lights to illustrate the movement of troops during the three-day Battle of Gettysburg.
“There’s a lot of nostalgia,” said Latschar, during a recent interview with the Gettysburg Times. “People grew up with the Electric Map, and many people can remember their first trip to Gettysburg, when they came in and watched the Electric Map program. For many people, their first visit was in the 1930s and 1940s when the Electric Map was a memorial event, because it was new and unusual when it was first created. But to kids that come to the park in 2006-07, the Electric Map puts them to sleep. The technology has not kept up with the times.”
The 70-year-old map’s next home?
“We’ll probably wrap it up and put it in one of our barns…until we figure out what we’re going to do with it, or decide where it’s going to go. It’ll be relatively safe, because all of our barns have a fire suppression system,” said Latschar. “But we haven’t even reached that point yet. We haven’t spent any money on engineering or figured out how we’re going to take it apart. We just don’t know.”
Relatives of Electric Map inventor Joseph Rosensteel had hoped his creation would remain on display, somewhere.
“It was his life’s work, and we don’t want to see it go away,” Christine Rosensteel, daughter of the late Joseph Rosensteel, said in a previous Times report.
The 900 square-foot map, park officials promise, will be safeguarded.
“We’ll preserve it until the National Park Service and the Gettysburg Foundation have the leisure to figure out if we’re going to have a future use,” said Latschar.
The map’s current home, at the present-day battlefield visitor center, is scheduled to be razed within the next 24 months, and NPS officials maintain that it wouldn’t make fiscal sense to crane the electronic structure out of the building.
“It’s 30 by 30, plywood and affixed to a steel frame,” explained Latschar. “Unless you have the ability to store it in one piece, in a 30-by-30 facility that will bear its weight, you have to take it apart. We’re going to have to take it out in pieces.”
After unsuccessful donation attempts, Gettysburg Battlefield administrators contemplated destroying the map, before deciding to store it.
“Several years ago when we knew that we didn’t have a use for it in the new museum, and I knew that I might get into trouble if I announced I was going to throw it on the scrap heap, we started looking for a good home. But we haven’t found a good home,” said Latschar. “We approached some major institutions, and everyone we talked to had an initial interest, because they’ve all heard of the Electric Map. But once they found at more, or actually came down and looked at the map and saw its size, they realized that they didn’t want it.”
Last year, the park and its non-profit partner, the Gettysburg Foundation, entertained offers from private entities for the map, but there were stipulations.
“You had to be non-profit. We weren’t about to give it away to a commercial venture,” said Latschar. “You also had to be away from Gettysburg, because we didn’t want anyone advertising that they had the original Electric Map, and then profiting from it, and competing with everything the (Gettysburg) Foundation is trying to do. After a while, though, we thought we were spending a lot of time with off the wall requests.”
When the new battlefield museum opens April 14, educational programs — like three miniature electronic diagrams and a 25-minute film — will replace the Electric Map.
The map’s technology, once innovative, is now archaic.
“It’s getting harder and harder to find lights for it,” GNMP curator Dean Knudsen said in a previous Times report. “It is especially hard to find replacements for the switches when they blow.”
Originally built in 1939 by Joseph Rosensteel, the map was an advanced measure of giving the battlefield’s 2 million annual visitors an overview of the Battle of Gettysburg.
Miniature bulbs activate, blinking off and on, showing the position and movement of the Union and Confederate armies.
“My personal reflection, when I first saw it in the 1990s, was that it was boring. I thought it took far longer than what it should have to tell the story that it was trying to tell, and it was telling that story in a fairly antiquated means,” said Latschar. “But there’s also another aspect to my opinion: I’m red, green brown color blind, just like a quarter of the male population in the United States, so I have a hard time distinguishing the lights. It’s something that people weren’t thinking about in the 1930s.”
Rosensteel used research from the War Department to locate the position, and advancement of troops in Gettysburg.
He then marked those observations on a topographic map.
The original masterpiece was in use until the early 1960s, when a newer version was built in an auditorium along Cemetery Ridge.
Years later, the federal government bought that facility, the current GNMP visitor center, and the map has never been relocated.
