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Civil War

99th PA Moore(w) / Fritz

Cumberland Township, Adams County, Pennsylvania

Marker Inscription

99th Regt. Pa. Vols. 2nd Brigade 1st Division 3rd Corps In memoriam Our fallen comrades July 2, 3, 1863. Erected by the 9th PA. Vet. Asso. and friends

The Story

Erected by a veterans' association and friends, this monument remembers the fallen of the 99th Pennsylvania Volunteers, who served in the Third Corps line during the fighting of July 2 and 3, 1863, at Gettysburg. The regiment was among the units drawn into the brutal combat on the army's left, where the second day's assaults tested the Union position to its limit. The dedication 'In memoriam our fallen comrades' reflects how survivors, years afterward, returned to consecrate the ground where friends had died.

Why it matters

It embodies the postwar impulse of veterans themselves to mark and mourn their dead on the fields of Gettysburg, shaping how the nation remembers the war.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

By the summer of 1863 the Civil War was two years old, and the fighting had ground on far longer and far more terribly than anyone had imagined when it began. That June, the Confederate army marched north across the Potomac and into Pennsylvania, carrying the war onto Northern soil for the second time. Farm towns that had only read about the fighting in newspapers suddenly found columns of soldiers moving along their roads.

Adams County was quiet, rolling farm country — orchards, wheat fields, and low ridges stitched together by country lanes. Its county seat, Gettysburg, mattered for a simple reason: roads met there from every direction. When two great armies were groping toward each other across southern Pennsylvania, that tangle of roads made a collision almost inevitable.

The men of the 99th Pennsylvania were part of the Union Army of the Potomac, the force shadowing the Confederate advance. They belonged to the Third Corps, and in early July 1863 they were drawn toward Gettysburg with the rest of the army — ordinary volunteers about to be thrown into one of the largest battles ever fought on the continent.

People & events

This monument speaks for a whole regiment rather than a single hero. The 99th Pennsylvania Volunteers served in the Second Brigade of the First Division, Third Corps — the part of the Union army posted on the far left of the line during the battle's second and third days, July 2 and 3, 1863.

The fighting on the army's left was among the most savage of the entire war. Across broken, boulder-strewn ground, wave after Confederate wave pressed against the Union flank through the long afternoon and evening of July 2. Regiments like this one held, gave ground, and counterattacked amid smoke and confusion, paying for every yard with men who did not come home.

Years later, the survivors came back. The inscription is not a boast about maneuvers won or ground taken — it is a memorial, raised by the regiment's veterans' association and their friends, to the comrades who fell here. That plainspoken dedication, 'in memoriam our fallen comrades,' tells you what the day cost the men who lived through it.

Its place in the American story

Gettysburg is remembered as the turning point of the Civil War — the high-water mark of the Confederate invasion of the North, after which the Southern armies never again mounted so ambitious a thrust across the Potomac. The Union stand here, on ground held at fearful cost, helped decide the war's direction.

But this stone matters for a second reason, quieter than the battle itself. In the decades after the war, the men who had fought at Gettysburg returned again and again to mark where they had stood and where their friends had died. They pooled their own money, formed associations, and raised hundreds of monuments across these fields.

That impulse — veterans consecrating their own battlefield — shaped how America chose to remember the Civil War. It turned a landscape of loss into a place of pilgrimage, and it left us a field where the memory is written not by later generations but by the survivors themselves.

If you visit

You'll find this monument among many that dot the fields where the Union left once stood. Come with time to slow down: the power of Gettysburg is less in any single stone than in the way the whole rolling landscape still reads as a battlefield, its ridges and hollows much as the soldiers saw them.

Stand for a moment and read the dedication. It was placed by men who had actually been here — who chose these exact words to mourn the friends they lost on July 2 and 3. Knowing that a comrade's grief, not an official committee, put the stone here changes how it feels.

The monument fits naturally into a driving or walking tour of the battlefield's southern reaches. Pair it with the wider sweep of the fields around it, and let the quiet do its work. This is farmland that became sacred ground, and it rewards visitors who linger rather than rush.

Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.

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