When you visit Gettysburg National Military Park, you can take a tour that follows the course of the three-day battle. The route ends at the National Cemetery, where, four months after the fighting, Abraham Lincoln gave the 270-word speech that marked the emergence of the United States as one nation. The tour does not cover the entire battlefield, however, because much of it lies outside the park. Retail outlets and restaurants, including a Hardee's and a Howard Johnsons, stand where General Pickett, at two o'clock on a July afternoon in 1863, marched 15,000 Confederate soldiers to their deaths. The Peach Orchard and Wheatfield, where General Longstreet attacked, became the site of a Stuckey's family restaurant. The Cavalry Heights Trailer Park graces fields where General George Custer turned back the final charge of the Confederate cavalry. Over his restaurant, Colonel Sanders, purveyor of fried chicken, smiles with neon jowls upon the monument to George Meade, the victorious Union general. Above this historic servicescape loomed until recently a 310-foot commercial observation tower Civil War buffs called “a wicked blight on the battlefield vista.”

One spring day, on my way to give a seminar on “economics and the environment” at Gettysburg College, I drove quickly past the battlefield where 23,000 Union and 28,000 Confederate soldiers fell in three days. I felt guilty speeding by the somber fields, but I had to teach at two o'clock. I checked my watch. I did not want to be late.