Satterlee U.S.A. General Hospital

Philadelphia, PA

Neighbors set this stone — carried from the battlefield at Gettysburg — in 1916 to mark the site of one of the Civil War's largest Union military hospitals, the West Philadelphia General, later renamed Satterlee General Hospital. Sprawling across West Philadelphia, Satterlee treated tens of thousands of sick and wounded soldiers, including many brought north from Gettysburg itself in July 1863. A piece of the battlefield thus commemorates the place where its casualties were nursed.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1998

John Page Nicholson fought in the Civil War and then devoted his life to remembering it. A meticulous scholar, he edited the two-volume Pennsylvania at Gettysburg and worked to preserve the battlefields at Gettysburg and Valley Forge. In 1888 he helped found a library and museum dedicated to the war he had lived through.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1999

George Gordon Meade rose from Army engineer to major general, taking command of the Army of the Potomac just days before it turned back Robert E. Lee's invasion at Gettysburg in July 1863 — the campaign that broke the Confederacy's northward push. Philadelphia was his family's city, and a grateful nation gave him a house here, where he lived until his death in 1872. The marker stands near that home, tying the Union's most consequential victory to the ordinary streets of the general who won it.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2012

For three weeks in June 1864, Logan Square filled with exhibits, goods, and crowds as the U.S. Sanitary Commission's Great Central Fair raised more than a million dollars for Union soldiers and their families. The Commission had grown out of the vast, largely female volunteer effort to feed, nurse, and comfort the men at the front. On June 16, President Abraham Lincoln—making his only official public appearance in Philadelphia—stepped before the crowd to praise the work being done there.