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Stop 8 of 20 · Gettysburg audio walking tour

Gettysburg Rostrum

Gettysburg National Cemetery · 1879 · Brick speaker's stand

What you'll hear here: about a minute of narration about Gettysburg Rostrum, and how it fits Gettysburg National Cemetery, written to be listened to on the spot rather than read at home.

Your stop is the Gettysburg Rostrum, a brick speaker's stand in Gettysburg National Cemetery. For more than a century people pointed to this very pavilion: it was identified in 1908 as the location of the Gettysburg Address, though it is now believed the Address was given elsewhere. The pavilion you see was constructed in 1879 by P. J. and J. J. Tawney, extended in 1904, and restored in 2013 for the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.

The craftsmanship of its brickwork and the sense of ceremony in its proportions help explain why later generations gathered here. Over the years the stand has hosted presidents who came to speak and to remember: Theodore Roosevelt (1904), William Howard Taft, Calvin Coolidge (1928), Herbert Hoover (1930), Franklin D. Roosevelt (1934), and Dwight D. Eisenhower (1955). Stand close enough to note the pavilion’s scale and imagine the audiences who filled the cemetery grounds to hear these men.

Presidents from Roosevelt to Eisenhower have returned to this rostrum to speak, drawn by the same brickwork and scale you see now.

Where it is

Coordinates
39.81786, -77.23191
Area
Gettysburg National Cemetery
Era
1879 · Brick speaker's stand
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Three stops free. No account needed. The audio plays itself as you walk.