Eternal Light Peace Memorial

In 1938, seventy-five years after the Battle of Gettysburg, veterans of the Union and Confederate armies from across the nation converged on Gettysburg for their last great reunion. All Civil War veterans were invited with expenses paid, and nearly 2,000 attended; most were in their nineties, and many were more than 100 years old. On the warm evening of Sunday, July 3, they gathered there with others to dedicate a monument to peace and national unity. President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered the dedication speech to a crowd estimated at 200,000. Designed by Paul Philipe Cret, the monument was built of Alabama limestone and Maine granite and topped by a natural gas torch intended to burn eternally as a symbol of the unity of the United States. The idea for a peace memorial had first been proposed in 1909 by a Pennsylvania commission planning Gettysburg's fiftieth anniversary; a new commission began planning it in 1935 for the seventy-fifth anniversary, Virginia became the first state to appropriate funds in 1936, the memorial was dedicated in 1938, and it was rededicated in 1988 on the battle's 125th anniversary.

Pennsylvania · United States