Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Born on a ranch in Montana in 1923, Bearss has been obsessed with the Civil War since
he was a boy. His dad read him bedtime stories about the Civil War, and he named his favor-
ite dairy cow Antietam. After graduating from high school in 1941, he thumbed around the
country visiting Civil War sites for a few months before joining the Marines.
THE NEW BATTLE
“If I'm interested in something, I don't get tired.”
—Ed Bearss
When he's not giving tours, Bearss is busy advocating for preservation of historic
sites. As he says, “Development is advancing more irresistibly than Grant's army
did on Richmond.” At Gettysburg, for example, the once idyllic vista of the battle-
field is broken by a water tower for an industrial park. For a while, there were plans
for a casino. Bearss has seen 19th-century forts bulldozed to make way for malls.
His bus tours often get stalled in shopping center traffic. As he says, “The battles
are going to be played out in the next 10 to 20 years, because by then the battlefield
parks will be islands in urban corridors of the United States, in a sea of sprawling
shopping malls.”
After some nasty mortar fire in the Pacific Theater of World War II left him wounded, he
spent his 26-month recovery reading everything he could find about the Civil War. He then
used the GI bill to get a degree in foreign service from Georgetown University (he also has
a master's in history from Indiana University) and eventually went to work for the National
Park Service. “It was a dream,” he says, “getting paid for doing what I would have done on
my own.”
In fact, it was at Vicksburg, Mississippi, his first Park Service assignment, that he began
giving interpretive tours. For years, he led eight one-hour tours a day around the Vicksburg
battlefields. Even after he was promoted and was no longer required to give tours, he kept it
up as a hobby on weekends. After retiring from his post as chief historian for the National
Park Service, he went freelance, traveling and leading groups up to 300 days a year.
Always the consummate tour guide, Bearss brings history alive to visitors of all know-
ledge levels. For years, he gave an annual tour of Vicksburg to the Louisiana School for the
Blind and Deaf. Not only has he visited virtually every battlefield in the country, but he also
has an encyclopedic memory, enormous personal energy, and groupies who literally follow
him from tour to tour. Not bad for a guy with 80 or so candles on his birthday cake.
