GETTYSBURG, Pa. - After years of effort, the National Park Service has acquired one of the most significant pieces of the original Gettysburg battlefield - the spot from which the first shot in that greatest of Civil War battles was fired.
The shooter was a Napiersville, Ill., man, Lt. (later Capt.) Marcellus E. Jones, in charge of the pickets of the 8th Illinois Cavalry. Jones first saw the ghostly shapes of Confederate skirmishers about 700 yards away down the Chambersburg Pike about 7:30 a.m. and borrowed a carbine from one of his sergeants to take a shot at their mounted officer.
According to Gettysburg National Military Park historian Scott Hartwig, Jones also fired the second shot of the battle. Both were aimed at an officer at the head of an advancing gray column, Hartwig said, and both apparently missed.
4-acre site
The ensuing battle resulted in 51,000 killed, wounded or missing and ended in a Confederate defeat from which the South never recovered.
Standing a mile and a quarter from the present military park boundary and about 2 miles from the center of Gettysburg, the house and grounds where that 1863 action took place belonged to an elderly man named Ephraim Wisler.
Park Superintendent John Latschar said the Park Service had been trying to acquire the 4-acre site for years, but the owners wanted more than its appraised value, which by law the National Park Service cannot exceed if it is buying property with tax dollars.
A private organization called Friends of the National Parks at Gettysburg raised the additional $5,000 needed, and the property was purchased for $130,000. "We've added about 400 acres to the park this way over the last 12 years," said Tom Vossler, chairman of the private group.
The house sits on a hill with a long view up the Chambersburg Pike, a key road in 1863 down which the Confederates made their initial advance.
The 8th Illinois Cavalry, then part of Brig. Gen. John Buford's division, helped to slow the progress of Gen. Robert E. Lee's assault and buy time for the rest of the Union army.
Jones served with the 8th Illinois for the rest of the war and returned to the Wisler house in 1886 to place a monument made of Napiersville granite at the edge of the property. It honored Jones for firing the shot as well as Sgt. Levi S. Shafer, who lent him the carbine that he used. The inscription reads in part: "First shot at Gettysburg, July 1, 1863, 7:30 a.m."
House to be restored
Wisler became a casualty of battle. Emerging from his house to learn what the commotion was about, he was so frightened by a Confederate artillery shell that landed in the road nearby that he took to his bed and died there a month later. Latschar said the house and grounds will be restored to their 1863 state and made an informative adjunct to the battlefield tour.
Despite the acquisition, Gettysburg has again made the list of the Civil War Preservation Trust's 10 most endangered Civil War battlefields, which was announced this spring.
According to Latschar, the battlefield is threatened by continuing commercial development generated by its popularity as a tourist attraction.
The others on the list are the city of Atlanta, whose fall was a major Union victory; Bentonville, N.C., where Confederates failed to stop Sherman's March; Chancellorsville, Va., Lee's greatest victory; Corinth, Miss.; Franklin, Tenn.; Richmond, Virginia's Gaines Mill and Cold Harbor battlefields; Harpers Ferry, W.Va.; Richmond, Ky., where the Union failed to stop a Confederate invasion of that border state; and Stones River, Tenn.
Michael Kilian is a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.