It’s Lights Off For The Electric Map
By Deborah Fitts

GETTYSBURG, Pa. — Its little lights have helped to explain the battle of Gettysburg to generations of visitors, but the Electric Map is now a thing of the past.

The giant topographical map, outfitted with lights to show troop movements and battle action, went dark as Gettysburg National Military Park shuttered its visitor center and opened its new facility April 14.

The park plans to cut the map’s 30-by-30-foot concrete slab, which is up to 10 inches thick, into four sections and store it.

Park spokesman Katie Lawhon said the park will remove the map “carefully” from the old visitor center and will probably place it in one of the park’s barns.

Despite its age, she pointed out that the map — unlike the Cyclorama painting — is not regarded as a historic object in itself, and the park is not charged with preserving it.

The park decided against using the map in the new visitor center and museum, Lawhon said, because it’s “pretty outdated at this point.”

Joseph Rosensteel, a member of the family that built the original visitor center and gathered the artifacts that today form the basis of the park’s collection, first fabricated the map in the late 1930s, and updated it with a new version in 1963.

The new facility has films and displays that offer visitors maps of troop movements, breaking down battle action in more detail than the Electric Map provided, Lawhon said. Three films, each addressing a different day of battle, “do what the Electric Map did in a way that’s going to work better for people and do it more thoroughly.”

She noted that some pieces of the Electric Map actually date to Rosensteel’s first rendition, in the late 1930s. Old switches and wiring have proved troublesome, she said.

The park would like to give the map to a good home. Under National Park Service guidelines, they can give it only to another government agency or to a nonprofit organization, and it must be put to an educational use, according to Lawhon.

Ideally, the new owner would come for the map before the park removes it from the old visitor center prior to razing the building next year.

While some park visitors bemoan the loss of the map, Lawhon said finding someone to take it has so far proved unsuccessful. The Smithsonian Institution, the U.S. Army Military History Institute in Carlisle, Pa., and a new army museum planned for Washington “have all pretty much given us a ‘No thank you,’” she said.

She cited the sheer size of the map, plus the space that a facility would need for the viewing public to sit around it.
“It’s a big commitment for any facility,” she concluded, while improvements in technology have dimmed the map’s luster by comparison.

Lawhon urges those who mourn the passing of the map to come to the new visitor center and museum “and see the way we tell the story in a very compelling way. We’ve done a fair job of doing what the map used to do.”