By Andrew Dalton, President & CEO of Gettysburg History
By 1938, only a small fraction of veterans from the Battle of Gettysburg were still alive and able to attend the 75th and final reunion of the blue and gray.
One of these veterans was Corporal Edward Jackson Hilliard of Company K, 8th Florida Infantry. Just 21 years old in 1863, his regiment charged across the Emmitsburg Road during the Confederate attacks on the afternoon of July 2nd, and Hilliard was wounded in the right side of his torso, then taken prisoner and treated at Camp Letterman General Hospital east of town.
At age 96, Hilliard made the long trip back to Gettysburg where he was photographed on July 1, 1938 shaking hands with Lt. Governor Edward Cooch of Delaware.
Hilliard lived another four and a half years, passing away at age 101 on January 2, 1943, during a time when young American soldiers in their 20s were fighting another war on faraway battlefields in Europe and the Pacific.
