A budget battle brews at Gettysburg

GETTYSBURG, Pa.—The Battle of Gettysburg, one of the largest ever fought on American soil, involved 160,000 troops. But on a recent April day, much of the yawning visitor center at Gettysburg National Military Park sat empty.

Scenes like this at one of the U.S.’s most famous battlefields are becoming more common. Attendance at the park peaked in 1970 with nearly 6.9 million visitors, according to National Park Service data, amid boom times for visits to cultural heritage sites.

Visitation troughed and leveled off from the 1980s to the 2000s, however, hovering between 1 and 2 million. Ken Burns’s 1990 documentary on the Civil War and the epic film Gettysburg, released in 1993, drew new rounds of attention to the park.

In 2018, attendance dipped below 1 million. It has yet to surpass that mark again. In 2024, Gettysburg saw just 742,000 visitors.

The task of reversing that decline is especially fraught right now. Not only are President Trump’s budget cuts affecting national parks across the nation, with more cuts likely on the way, but Gettysburg in particular is about to reach a pivotal moment: NPS is preparing to retake control over the visitor center in 2028, ending a decades-long, often criticized partnership with the private Gettysburg Foundation.

Gettysburg isn’t alone. The Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania battlefields in Northern Virginia, which saw a peak of 1.3 million visitors in 1976, have seen visitation taper off since 2017. Vicksburg National Military Park in Mississippi saw over a million visitors in 2002 but has welcomed less than half of that each year since 2020.

“It’s a sector-wide problem,” said Jackie Spainhour, who started her tenure as president of the Gettysburg Foundation in February. “Gettysburg is one of many museums and historic sites that are having the visitation decline.”

Some speculate attendance has declined for political reasons.

“Some of it has to do with the fact that there’s still this pervasive ‘Lost Cause’ view of the Civil War,” said Andrew Dalton, president and CEO of the Adams County Historical Society, which encompasses the rural part of Pennsylvania where the battlefield sits. “I think people fairly and unfairly perhaps associate Gettysburg with the very antiquated view of the American Civil War.

“I think people are having a hard time grappling with even more difficult moments of our history, and I think sometimes the reaction to that is to just turn the lights off and not visit those sites or really try to understand the stories,” he added.

Twenty-six sitting presidents have visited Gettysburg, most recently George W. Bush in 2008. In 2016, Trump visited the site for a campaign rally, and in 2020, then-nominee Joe Biden delivered a closing pitch to voters there.

The park is trying to address waning visitation at a time when, like most federal agencies, NPS has been beset by cuts and a unique public-private partnership nears its end.

On President Trump’s first day in office, he issued an executive order placing a hiring freeze on all federal civilian employees. For national parks like Gettysburg, the order means seasonal workers, who make up a majority of staff, can’t be hired back. Additionally, four probationary workers at Gettysburg were laid off.

“They provide safety, they provide crowd control, they do interpretation,” said Brenda Barrett, a retired National Park Service employee.

Funding for national parks has remained largely constant over the last two decades, but NPS has acquired additional sites and has seen its workforce cut even prior to the current administration’s cuts.

“It’s not just now. It’s been for a long time the NPS has been underfunded and understaffed. … It’s becoming more of a conversation now, and we’re seeing more the culmination of how that’s affected NPS,” Spainhour said.

She said threats to NPS’s funding have forced the Gettysburg Foundation to increase its financial support for the institution.

First known as the Gettysburg National Battlefield Museum Foundation, the Gettysburg Foundation boasts a historians' council that includes Ken Burns, James McPherson, and Eric Foner. Former Pennsylvania governor and U.S. attorney general Dick Thornburgh served on the foundation’s board. Today, A.J. Kazimi, CEO of Cumberland Pharmaceuticals, chairs the board, which includes retired officials from the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry, the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service, and Blackstone.

The National Park Foundation, chartered by Congress in 1967, is NPS’s official nonprofit partner, soliciting donations on its behalf to benefit some 400 parks across the country. Partnerships like the one between Gettysburg and the Gettysburg Foundation, on the other hand, which involve a foundation managing resources for the park, are more rare. The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, for instance, manages the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration, the Statue of Liberty Museum, and the American Family Immigration History Center.

NPS launched a partnership with the Gettysburg Foundation in 2000, ceding control of the construction and management of a new Museum-Visitor Center. The agreement, which Congress revised in 2002, gave the foundation the authority to raise funds to design, build, and operate the center.

To hear some critics tell it, that’s when the problems began.

“The seeds of the park’s decline were sown as far back in 2000, in which park leaders began a series of decisions that ignored the advice of experts and set the national landmark on an unsustainable financial footing,” said Tom Desjardin, who served as the archivist and historian at Gettysburg in the 1990s.

In a 2009 story in National Journal, Civil War preservationists decried the “mammoth size” of the 139,000-square-foot flagship building and its $103 million price tag, as well as the lack of government oversight over the project and the foundation.

“Hubris, poor management, and even alleged corruption hounded the project from the beginning,” Desjardin said.

While NPS initially promised the project would not require federal funding, Congress threw $15 million toward it, and the commonwealth of Pennsylvania contributed $20 million. The general agreement between NPS and the foundation does not prohibit federal funding.

Robert Wilburn, the president of the Gettysburg Foundation at the time, said during an inquiry by the Interior Department’s Office of the Investigator General that he knew the initial $39.3 million price tag for the building was too low.

"Given the dramatic drop in visits and revenue that have occurred since the new visitor facility opened, the Gettysburg Foundation has shown that it is not capable of managing that operation successfully,” Desjardin said. “Beginning in 2028, the U.S. taxpayers will be left to pay for this failure, with visits reaching lows not seen since the 1950s and revenue falling by millions each year [in real dollars].”

A 2009 report from the Office of the Inspector General for the Interior Department found that the foundation acknowledged that the partnership was “controversial” but found no evidence of fraud or conflict of interest between NPS and the foundation over the course of the construction of the visitor center. In 2018, the OIG conducted another investigation and found that between 2014 and 2016, former park Superintendent Ed Clark accepted more than $23,000 in meals, lodging, and other gifts paid for by the foundation.

While the foundation manages the administrative and operational costs, which came to $8.1 million in fiscal 2024, NPS owns and manages the educational exhibits in the museum. Now, the foundation is preparing to relinquish control over the Museum-Visitor Center. But its leaders plan to remain involved with the well-being of the park.

“They always have a ready partner that’s willing to fundraise for them,” Spainhour said. “They’re not having to seek out an extra firm or someone that could do that work for them.”

She said the foundation tries to fortify in-person visitation initiatives with digital education programs that feature historians talking about the battle.

“We are trying to innovate as best we can,” she said. “I think that that’s our best way to get new audiences.”

The foundation is broadly working to attract more children and families to the site while engaging the core base of history buffs and reenactors.

“I really feel that if you’re able to have children come here, the family will follow,” Spainhour said. “For me, it’s about engaging with children. I think that’s really where you have to start.”

Gettysburg is an open-air park, meaning visitors do not need to pay an entry fee to see the battlefield or the visitor center. Early on in their partnership, NPS and Gettysburg Foundation officials did not plan to charge a fee for visitors to view the museum exhibits.

The George and Emily Rosensteel family, the descendants of John Rosensteel, who assisted in burial detail in the wake of the battle, donated a 38,000-piece collection to the museum valued at tens of millions of dollars. Their grandchild, Pamela Jones, told National Journal in 2009 that “the gift was made to the American people in the hope that the artifacts would always be viewed for free."

But after opening the museum in 2008 and predicting an annual revenue shortfall, officials imposed a $7.50 “all-in-one” fee to see all the park’s attractions. In the public-comment period ahead of that decision, roughly half of comments approved of the fee and roughly one-third opposed it.

“Some opposed the implementation of a fee to enter the museum on principle, expressing their belief that the museum collections held by the NPS should be available to all citizens at no charge,” the 2009 OIG report said.

Now, the “all-in-one” ticket is $20.75 for adults, and entry to the museum costs $14.75.

In fiscal 2024, the Gettysburg Foundation made roughly $5.7 million in revenue from tickets.

“It is no secret that higher prices deter visitors, and with visitation already at an all-time low, revenue is unlikely to grow,” Desjardin said.

The Gettysburg Foundation is a member of the Museums for All initiative, which allows families who receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits to enter the museum for free.

Other area organizations are working to boost interest in Gettysburg, too.

“We have a lot of work to do to make Gettysburg more relevant,” Dalton said. “We think about that every day.”

The historical society has planned a film festival slated for next month with Ken Burns, and it is also working on a Black history museum to be located in downtown Gettysburg, Dalton said.

“We’re trying to really fill in gaps to make sure that we’re focused on storytelling, what visitors want to see, and how to stay relevant,” he said.