Abraham Lincoln - The David Wills House - Gettysburg, PA
N 39° 49.848 W 077° 13.839
18S E 309114 N 4411358
To the left of the entrance of this NPS and NRHP site is an old marker containing the Gettysburg Address, a location reputed to be one of the places where LIncoln wrote the brief but famous speech while dedicating the National Cemetery.
Waymark Code: WMBM1B
Location: Pennsylvania, United States
Date Posted: 05/31/2011
Views: 11
On November 9, 1933, this plaque was officially installed and dedicated, celebrating the 70th anniversary of Lincoln's stay here at this house. He actually stayed here on July 10, 1863 and delivered the Gettysburg Address the very next day. There are many plaques around the country and world with the Gettysburg address but this one is especially significant as it is on the place where he was supposed to have written part of the speech. There is also a beautiful, profiled relief of Lincoln at the top of the bronze memorial. Naturally the plaque is located on the Lincoln Highway, attached to the Wills House, facing the highway. Parking is available along the street for a quarter. The bronze plaque is in perfect shape and reads:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln
Presented to the Grand Army of the Republic, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. In Memory of My Father, Theodore Henry Cazeau, Co. M. 8th New York Volunteer Cavalry by Captain Henry Lomb Camp No. 100, Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War and Theodore Charles Cazea, Past Commander-In-Chief, Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War.
Nov. 19, 1933