Please join us for a Chambersburg Civil War Seminars & Tours Lecture Series! Our next lecture will be: Too Much For Human Endurace: The George Spangler Farm Hospitals and the Battle of Gettysburg by Ron Kirkwood. Cost is $5 per person. Zoom Login details will be sent with your email registration confirmation. The talk will be recorded and sent to participants to view about a week after the live talk.

Ron Kirkwood argues in “Too Much for Human Endurance” that the George Spangler farm was the most important farm in the Battle of Gettysburg, revealing factors that have been overlooked for generations. The book and his presentation also offer newly found information about Confederate Brig. Gen. Lewis A. Armistead’s time at Spangler, the Spanglers, the Artillery Reserve and stories of the suffering and heroism of the surgeons, nurses, wounded and mortally wounded at the two hospitals on the Spanglers’ land.

Ron Kirkwood is the author of “Too Much for Human Endurance: The George Spangler Farm Hospitals and the Battle of Gettysburg,” which was published by Savas Beatie LLC in hardcover in June 2019. The book went into its second hardcover printing in October 2019, and both hardcover editions are now sold out. It was published in paperback in January 2021 and audio in February 2021.

Kirkwood is retired after a 40-year career as an editor and writer in newspapers and magazines including USA TODAY, the Baltimore Sun, the Harrisburg Patriot-News and the York Daily Record. He edited national magazines for USA TODAY Sports and was National Football League editor for USA TODAY Sports Weekly. He won numerous state, regional and national writing and editing awards during his career and managed the 32-person copy desk in Harrisburg when the newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012. Kirkwood is a Michigan native and graduate of Central Michigan University, where he has returned as guest speaker to journalism classes as part of the school’s Hearst Visiting Professionals series.

Kirkwood has been a Gettysburg Foundation guide at the George Spangler Farm Civil War Field Hospital Site since it opened in 2013. He lives in York, Pa., with his wife of 45 years, Barbara.