105 years ago — the fight to commemorate the Battle of Hanover
At the start of the 20th century, political disputes clouded the efforts to erect a suitable memorial to the June 30, 1863 Battle of Hanover (which was fought 147 years ago today in southwestern York County, Pennsylvania). Perhaps if Hanover’s civic officials and Pennsylvania authorities back in 1905 would have seen more clearly to not only erect a memorial marker, but to place easements on the Karle Forney farm, the battlefield itself might have been preserved, not just the fading memory.
Image from newsinhistory.com; Baltimore American, July 1, 1905.
it did not take long for one of the disputes to get settled!
Here is the original dispute from a couple of years before the monument was erected.
The Battle of Hanover commemorative statue, nicknamed “The Picket,” was finally dedicated in 1905. Please See my earlier blog entry for details.
Of course, the real issue of land preservation was never settled, and the Forney farm, so critical to the battle, eventually became just another cookie-cutter subdevelopment.
