(Corrects 10th paragraph to show about 50,000 were killed,
wounded or went missing during the battle, not 50,000 dead)
By Jeffrey B. Roth
PITTSBURGH, May 25 (Reuters) – Fifty years after the Battle
of Gettysburg, the bloodiest of the U.S. Civil War, a survivor
of that fight marched 200 miles (320 km) from Pittsburgh to the
site of the battle for a reunion attended by both Union and
Confederate veterans.
On Sunday, another veteran, Jim Smith, 70, of Hempfield,
Pennsylvania, will start out on the same trek as part of the
observation of Memorial Day, when Americans honor their war
dead. By a stroke of luck, Smith will be carrying the same drum
– a throaty field snare – played by his spiritual forebear,
Union Army veteran Peter Guibert.
“Getting Peter’s drum was a fortuitous happening,” said
Smith, a U.S. Navy veteran of the Vietnam War and a retired
mechanical engineer.
Smith, a drummer and hobbyist who restores musical
instruments, was profiled by a Pennsylvania newspaper about 30
years ago when he started a fife and drum crops in western
Pennsylvania.
That story caught the attention of Betty Mower, now 87,
whose uncle, Otto Guibert, had recently died. Mower had
inherited a relic from her uncle’s attic, which she knew only as
“Grandpa Peter’s army drum,” she recalled at a Friday memorial
service for Peter Guibert.
Mower had considered throwing away the drum, which she had
not been allowed to touch as a child, but thought it would
interest Smith and got in touch with him.
“When it had been up in the attic, it got encrusted with
coal dust and it looked pretty decrepit,” Smith said. “It sat
for quite a while, but I eventually got around to restoring it.”
Smith became curious about the drum’s owner, and after
scouring military and civilian records, learned about Guibert’s
journey to Gettysburg.
He plans to recreate the march with Ray Zimmerman, 65,
another Vietnam veteran. The men aim to arrive in Gettysburg in
time for ceremonies to mark the 150th anniversary of the battle,
which was fought from July 1-3, 1863.
Some 50,000 soldiers from the North and South were killed,
wounded or went missing at Gettysburg, which is regarded as a
turning point in the war that preserved the United States as a
single country and also led to the abolition of slavery.
(Editing by Scott Malone and Bill Trott)
