By Dan Sheehan
Of Our Dillsburg Bureau
Angela Rosensteel Eckert bore the glow of victory yesterday when she sat in her lawyer's office to announce the end of the second battle of Gettysburg.
The 81-year-old sued the National Park Service last year in an effort to have her family's collection of Civil War artifacts moved out of Gettysburg National Military Park's museum and visitors center, where it had been molding in storage for lack of display space.
The parties reached a settlement in U.S. District Court this week, with the Park Service agreeing to move the 38,000-piece collection to a climate-controlled area in a temporary storage building to be completed April 1.
Once a new visitors center is built, the collection will be moved there.
Also yesterday, U.S. Rep. Ron Klink, D-Westmoreland, introduced a House bill calling for the new center to be named the George D. and Emily G. Rosensteel Memorial Visitors Center, in memory of Eckert's parents.
"I just think it is tremendous that we have finally come to a settlement," said Eckert, who was born in a house on the battlefield in 1918.
She attended the news conference at attorney John Fenstermacher's Hampden Twp. office with her husband, Lawrence, the park museum's former curator.
Reading from a statement, Eckert said her family "stood firm and protected our legacy and our country's heritage. We sincerely hope that the eyes of our government are now focused on the proper care of our country's history and that this type of neglect will never happen again."
Fenstermacher said he was pleased by the settlement.
"The most important lesson here is that you had two older Americans step forward and say, 'You can't do this to our collection,'" he said. "It was one of those cases maybe a lot of people wouldn't have done but needed to be done. I certainly didn't like the way these people had been treated."
In a joint statement, the family and the Park Service said they regretted "the tension and division" resulting from the dispute.
"The parties share a strong commitment to protection of the artifact collection at Gettysburg," the statement said.
No one from the Park Service returned phone calls for comment yesterday.
The collection began just two days after the July 1863 battle, when Eckert's great-uncle, John Rosensteel, a boy of 13 who helped bury the dead, found and kept a Confederate musket.
His nephew, George Rosensteel, founded the National Civil War Museum and Visitors Center in the home he built in 1921. The building, where Angela Eckert grew up, houses the visitors center and museum.
Eckert said the musket remains her favorite piece in the collection, which has been valued at $50 million.
"It was the piece that started it all," she said.
Eckert's parents and her brother, Joseph, built the bulk of the collection and donated it to the United States in 1971. It is one of the largest collections of Civil War and Indian artifacts in the world.
The Park Service, which displays only about 8 percent of its collection because of space constraints, publicized the poor condition of the stored pieces to argue for private construction of a $40 million visitors center.
Dismayad by the treatment of the collection and angered by their belief that the Park Service was using it as leverage for a new building, the family asked for its return in October 1998 but received no response.
The family filed the federal lawsuit in March of last year, seeking the items' return or relocation to an environmentally sound site.
Fenstermacher said the Park Service obtained emergency funds to build the temporary center.
The Park Service plans to tear down the current visitors center and Cyclorama Center and build a visitors center in collaboration with a nonprofit agency.
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