Gettysburg, PA
W05 sits 2 miles west of Gettysburg — fly in for the most consequential three days in American history (July 1-3, 1863). Enterprise rental available at the airport, or local taxi to the Battlefield Visitor Center for the 1884 Cyclorama panoramic painting and the auto tour. Downtown Gettysburg has Dobbin House Tavern (1776, oldest most historic restaurant in town), Mr. G's Ice Cream, Garryowen Irish Pub, and the Farnsworth House where the Confederate sharpshooter's bullet still scars the south brick wall. Gas station / convenience store 100 yards from the airport on Rt 30 for the quick stop. Adams County orchards in summer. Eisenhower's farm is here too.
3nm W of the battlefield. The single 3,100ft runway is short by civilian standards but long enough for the GA traffic this field serves — pilots flying in for the Gettysburg National Military Park, which sits immediately east. The three-day July 1863 battle, the turning point of the Civil War, ranged across the rolling Pennsylvania farmland visible from the pattern. Seminary Ridge, Cemetery Ridge, Devil's Den, the Round Tops, and the Peach Orchard are all within 5nm. Eisenhower National Historic Site (Ike's farm and presidential retreat) is adjacent to the battlefield. No fuel at the field; closest is at KTHV York 25nm east.
The turning point of the Civil War (July 1863). From 3000ft, the entire three-day battle becomes legible: Seminary Ridge (Confederate position) and Cemetery Ridge (Union position) run parallel with open farmland between them — Pickett's Charge crossed that open ground. The Round Tops, Devil's Den, and the Peach Orchard are all identifiable. The geometric patterns of monuments and cannons dot the preserved fields. Gettysburg Regional (W05) is 3nm west.
Three miles south of Sharpsburg, Maryland — the site of the September 17, 1862 Battle of Antietam, the single bloodiest day in American military history. 22,717 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded, or missing in twelve hours of fighting along Antietam Creek and the cornfields, sunken road ("Bloody Lane"), and stone bridge ("Burnside Bridge") that anchor today's preserved battlefield. The tactical result was a draw, but the strategic result was Robert E. Lee's first invasion of the North turned back — which gave President Lincoln the political cover to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation five days later, on September 22, 1862, transforming the Civil War from a war to preserve the Union into a war to end slavery. The battlefield preserves 3,250 acres and most major terrain features look essentially as they did in 1862 — the Dunker Church (the photograph reference point for one of the most-published images of the Civil War), the cornfield, the sunken road, Burnside Bridge over Antietam Creek. The National Cemetery on the hill holds 4,776 Union dead. Photographer Alexander Gardner's images of the battlefield dead, displayed at Mathew Brady's New York studio in October 1862, were the first time the American public saw the dead of war — and arguably the moment war photography was invented.
Harpers Ferry sits on a spit of land where the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers join and three states — West Virginia, Maryland, and Virginia — come together, walled in by steep wooded heights. Thomas Jefferson stood here in 1783 and called the view "worth a voyage across the Atlantic." Its position made it a natural arsenal town, and in October 1859 the abolitionist John Brown seized the federal armory here in a raid meant to spark a slave uprising; he was captured (by US Marines under Robert E. Lee) and hanged, but the raid lit the fuse of the Civil War. The town changed hands a reported eight times during the war. Today the lower town is preserved as a national historical park, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy headquarters sits here at the trail's symbolic midpoint, and the rivers and railroad still define the gap.
Once a decaying industrial waterfront, Baltimore's Inner Harbor was reborn in the 1970s-80s as one of the first and most influential "festival marketplace" waterfront redevelopments in America — a model cities everywhere copied. The basin holds the National Aquarium, the historic ships including the USS Constellation (the last all-sail warship built by the US Navy, 1854), the Maryland Science Center, and Harborplace. Above it rises Federal Hill, with its commanding view. Baltimore is a working harbor town at heart — Chesapeake Bay crabs, the row-house neighborhoods, Fort McHenry guarding the approach — and the Inner Harbor is its front parlor, the place that turned the city back toward its water.