View attachment 107500 View attachment 107499 I am having a meeting with Zach Bolitho Chief of Natural Resources at GNP a week from this Friday to discuss and show some of the destruction their projects have caused over the past 5 or so years which is part of their overall Comprehensive plan from 1999. The current project they are working on is the restoration of Ziegler woods and ravine which used to be the old visitor parking lot and site of the recently dismantled Cyclorama building. I am all in favor of the landscape restoral, except they again are doing a disservice to the trees and plant life in the area. The old woods was first thinned out on the west and south side in the 1880s, replanted after the parks incorporation in the mid 1890s, and again disrupted with the building of the visitor center in the 1920s, and again with the building of the cyclorama and its parking lot in the early 1960s. So of course instead of preserving the last area of original forested area which also was a drainage area with amphibious and marsh life, on the north side of Hancock Ave. the last of the remaining woodlot this past month was cut down, along with 3 witness hickory trees. One tree in the Gettysburg Daily website was a large 80 inch pignut hickory with a do not cut ribbon tied around it. The park service has not responded to me with any answers to these questions, and further states on their website that all known witness trees in the area were preserved and protected, which is an outright false statement as I took these photos of the cut down trees before they quickly whisked them away. The old photo shows the old north side of Hancock ave woodlot where they completely cut down. The two stumps are of shagbark hickory witness trees, and the smaller upper crown trunk approx. 50 ft above ground is of the pignut hickory tree showing approx. 115-125 rings. Note the replanted trees in the foreground are from the replanting in the mid 1890s and the photo was taken from the old Ziegler observation tower.
View attachment 107496 View attachment 107497 View attachment 107498 , and the north side of Hancock Ave. was stocked full of large battle era trees. It was wrong to completely wipe out the original members of the woodlot witness trees or not, and now the marsh area is all dried up and it will take many years for the north side of Ziegler's grove to regrow back to any similar appearance it had during the battle.