Where exactly did Lincoln stand at Gettysburg?

[David Lockmiller]

New York Times - 11/19/2022

Since the 1990s, visitors to Gettysburg National Cemetery have been told the hallowed spot actually lies just over an iron fence, in Evergreen Cemetery, the town’s burial ground. But Christopher Oakley, a former Disney animator turned Civil War sleuth, has combined intense analysis of 19th-century photographs with 21st-century 3-D modeling software to argue that Lincoln was standing inside the national cemetery after all.

His research was unveiled on Friday at the Lincoln Forum, a gathering of some 300 scholars and enthusiasts who meet in Gettysburg each year, during the run-up to the official commemoration of Lincoln’s address on Nov. 19. As he clicked through his presentation, there were whispered “Wows,” capped with a standing ovation.

In an interview before the presentation, Harold Holzer, the group’s chairman, called Oakley’s research “ingenious,” and catnip for members, for whom discovering the exact location “is as crucial as discovering where Moses got the Ten Commandments.”