The map room itself appears frozen in time. After paying $4 admission, visitors settle into slate gray folding chairs overlooking the concrete relief map. A portrait of O'Neil's father, captioned "Originator of the Map," hangs under the podium where he used to lecture. A spotlight hung above the painting has burned out.
As the overhead lights dim, a sonorous male voice announces "You are located in the center of one of the most famous battlefields in the world." Orange and blue lights flicker on and off, representing the movements of Union and Confederate troops.
For decades after Rosensteel's death, a recording of his voice accompanied the presentation, but it was replaced in the 1980s. Most of the script still follows his wording, though, and O'Neil, sitting beside her husband Tom in the darkened auditorium, recites passages along with the narrator.
Rosensteel made an early version of the map in 1939, when he was 25, but wanted to create a bigger and better one for the battle's centennial. O'Neil recalls seeing her father crouched on his hands and knees, plotting dimensions on the map. He labored over recording the voiceover, she says, because he had already been weakened by the cancer that would claim his life.
Visitors to the historic Gettysburg site, which includes acres of bucolic fields, hundreds of monuments, the visitor center and a circular painting of the battle known as the Cyclorama, have varied opinions on the map.
Nathan Dapper, an American history teacher from Prior Lake, Minn. brought 45 of his students from Twin Lakes Middle School to see the map.
"It does a really good job of giving the kids an overall view of a huge battlefield. When they go out to the battlefield they have a point of reference," he says. "If you have some historical context, it's not a field, it's sacred ground."
Visitors J.D. Rymoff Jr. of Lebanon City, Pa. and Leslie Palmer, of Dover, Ohio, say that the map helped them understand the military strategy behind the battle. "It puts it in perspective," Rymoff says.
But other visitors to the battlefield said they skipped the map because it seems outdated.
Bente Dalsgaard of Denmark toured the battlefield with her husband and school age son on a misty afternoon. "Our son had already downloaded a video game of Gettysburg before we left Denmark. So you visualize it in a different way," she said.
