Reverend Henry Eyster Jacobs took after his father, Dr. Michael Jacobs. He followed him into the Lutheran clergy; he was a teacher, a writer, and a keen observer of the era he lived in. The oldest of four, he was born in 1844 when his parents had been married for 11 years; his father was 36 and his mother 33.

His father taught him to be observant, which served Henry well later as he recorded much about his life. Newspapers went to him frequently to remember Gettysburg and the battle or the advent of new technologies and how they influenced life. In recalling the Gettysburg Address, The Gettysburg Times in 1923 had Reverend Jacobs retell his experience, though with clear embellishing. The paper described Henry as a boy “with the curiosity of small boys” who “pushed and squirmed” his way to the foot of the platform. Henry was, in fact, nineteen years old, so it’s hard to know whether he actually stood near the foot of the platform. He told the paper that Edward Everett spoke for one hour and fifty-seven minutes, that Everett’s speech was now forgotten, and that no one remembered Everett’s allusions to “Plato, Lord Bacon and the European wars.” He described Lincoln as “impassive” and “immovable” and that he gave his short speech from a handful of notes that he had kept in his pocket.

Like his father, Henry was a consistent writer, and he wrote his memoirs, from which The Gettysburg Times published excerpts. In particular, Henry commented on life before and after the arrival of the steam engine in Gettysburg. He noted that carriage making had been probably the top industry in the town through the 1850s. He vividly described carriage rides and their hazards, telling of a trip his parents took to Pittsburgh in 1840 in which they arrived in bandages from the beating they took during the rough ride. Likewise, he cited an uncle who suffered a serious knee injury and another traveler who broke a wrist.

To Henry, 1859 was a dividing line in the history of the town. The railroad arrived, and with it, local commerce fundamentally changed. Fruits and vegetables had mostly come from within the county; now they could be shipped from regional centers north and south. Likewise, meat typically came from the animals of local farms, and well-to-do families purchased several hogs during slaughtering season, which they turned into meat for the year. With the advent of the railroad, meat could be shipped in year-round from numerous locations. This changed people’s jobs, according to Henry. People who had grown or made and sold their own wares now became retailers of others’ goods. Trains brought new fashions to the town weekly, whereas clothes from big cities had typically only come in from semiannual visits of merchants to the big cities.

The War also heavily influenced change. With its opening in 1861, the carriage-making shops failed—the South had provided a steady market for Gettysburg carriages, but with the War on, that market collapsed never to return. Henry recalled that carriage making involved the manufacture and assembly of every part on site. He recounted how tires were heated and then forced on to the wheels while water was poured over them to them and tighten them to the iron.

Of course, carriage making was central to how many later events shook out in Gettysburg. Carriage maker Charles Hoffman moved his business south, taking a young Wesley Culp with him, which later inspired Wesley to join the Confederate cause.

Henry’s observations and memories are sharp—he possessed an eye for detail but could connect details to huge movements and social changes. He was particularly clear-eyed and prescient about Gettysburg’s fate and its future. The battle itself reshaped the trajectory of the town forever, freezing in time many of its fields, farms, and shops. Today, Gettysburg’s number 1 industry, by far, is tourism related to the National Military Park and the battle. Henry articulated this well: “Gettysburg, in the very nature of the case, could never be an agricultural or a manufacturing center. The educational institutions there and the battlefield, both of which were determined by the old roads, have made it all that it has become.”