The Great Reunion of 1913

The photographs on this page, brought to life.

Veterans at the High Water Mark monument, 2 July 1913. The mount carries their names. W. H. Tipton. Library of Congress.

Fifty years after the battle, both armies came back and camped on the same field. The encampment ran from the twenty-ninth of June to the fourth of July, 1913. The Pennsylvania Commission planned for forty thousand men. 53,407 veterans came, from forty-six of the forty-eight states — every state but Nevada and Wyoming. Counting the soldiers, cooks and Boy Scouts who ran the place, 57,198 people were quartered and fed. The average age of the veterans was seventy-two. The youngest known to have been in the camp was sixty-one. The oldest claimed he was a hundred and twelve. The Great Tent was two hundred feet by four hundred and fifty, with thirteen thousand chairs in it. There were ninety latrines, a hundred miles of telephone wire, and no veteran was ever more than four hundred feet from a telephone. It was a hundred degrees for most of it. More than seven hundred and forty men were treated in the camp hospital, most of them for heat exhaustion. On the third of July, at the hour of Pickett's Charge, there was a flag ceremony at the Bloody Angle, and survivors of Pickett's Division and the Philadelphia Brigade shook hands across the stone wall. The photograph of it is the reason anyone remembers the reunion at all. What the retellings add — the rebel yell, the weeping, the men vaulting the wall — is not in any account we could source. The publisher of the best modern book on the reunion calls the handshake the climactic photo op, which is nearer the truth and no less remarkable for it. President Wilson came on the fourth of July, spoke in the Great Tent about a country that had found itself again, and left after the anthem. Enemies no longer, he said, generous friends rather. They did it once more, in 1938, for the seventy-fifth. 1,845 veterans came that time. The average age was ninety-four. If an ancestor of yours was at either reunion, add his name and his regiment below. Compiled by MyHistoryStone from published reference sources, August 2026. Corrections welcome.