Zinker spotting

I was in Gettysburg to go to the Boyd’s Bears store before it completely closes.  On the way back, we needed to stop for a bite to eat, so I drove through the town of Gettysburg rather than around it on the highway.  As we were passing the old visitor center, I spotted a marker with a distinctive blue-gray dull finish.

“That’s a zinker!”  We pulled into a parking lot to do another swing by the monument and confirm that it wasn’t a trick of the light.

I have lost count of the number of times I have gone to Gettysburg.  I have driven in and out of the old visitor’s center parking lot dozens of times, and yet, right by the one entrance, I had never noticed a rather short little zinker, even after I started seriously reading about monuments.  I pulled into the empty parking lot for General Pickett’s Buffet, which is the way I would recommend locating this marker if you want to – it is on the corner at the entrance to the old visitor’s center directly across from General Pickett’s Buffet on Steinwehr Avenue.

I had read on some of the websites about the Monumental Bronze Company that, in addition to grave markers, they also had created some cities’ Civil War monuments, but I had never seen one.  And here in front of me was a zinker, about 8 feet high from my own current home state of Ohio.  Instead of names and birth and death years for the deceased, the rectangular plaques at the base of the obelisk displayed details of the unit’s participation in the battle.  War imagery like the  symbol of the Second Corps and a cartridge box replaced funerary symbols.  The flank markers, approximating the right and left terminals of the unit’s position, were also zinkers.