Little Round Top served as host to one of many areas of conflict during the bloody struggles of July 2nd, 1863.
Tremendous bravery by Union and Confederate soldiers alike clasped hands with unspeakable, misery-laced brutality.
This view looks east towards Little Round Top over the small, barely visible stream called Plum Run in what came to be known as
the Valley of Death. Up these craggy slopes, Confederate men surged. On these grounds, Union men held. On these fields, Death
chose no sides, working his craft with brutal efficiency. For a time, the Plum Run trickled by the dead of both side,
tainted a continuous crimson red.
Fifty years after the battle's
end, the former Union Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, later promoted to Brigadier General, would again visit this bloodstained
ground. In powerful prose written shortly before his death, the Union commander captured the meaning of this place on that day.
"I went, it is not long ago, to stand again on that crest whose one day's crown of fire has passed into
the blazoned coronet of fame...I sat there alone, on the storied crest, till the sun went down as it did before over the misty
hills, and the darkness crept up the slopes, till from all earthly sight I was buried as with those before. But oh, what radiant
companionship rose around, what steadfast ranks of power, what bearing of heroic souls. Oh, the glory that beamed through those
nights and days...The proud young valor that rose above the mortal, and then at last was mortal after all."
[2,A]
General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, 1913
"Through Blood and Fire at Gettysburg"
on his visit to the Little Round Top
at Gettysburg Battlefield
