Three of the more than 1,300 memorials at Gettysburg National Military Park will be given a thorough cleaning and polishing during June, according to the National Park Service.

The work will necessitate closing the upper observation decks and first floor of the battlefield’s much-visited State of Pennsylvania Monument between about June 8 and June 28. The other, smaller monuments — the New York State Monument in the Soldiers’ National Cemetery and the State of Vermont Monument on Hancock Avenue — are scheduled for work between June 4 and June 6.

The top floor of an old brick commercial building in downtown Washington was Barton’s apartment and office where she collected donated medical supplies for the battlefield and later ran the Missing Soldiers Office. She closed the office in 1867, storing files and personal clothing in the crude attic above her rooms. She never came back for them, and they stayed in their hidden storage space until 1996, when a federal government carpenter discovered the cache while preparing the building for demolition.

Winston Groom, author of the new must-read book “Shiloh, 1862,” will speak at National Geographic on Thursday at 7:30 p.m. If he is anywhere near as good a speaker as he is a writer, this will be a terrific evening for anyone with an interest in the Civil War.

Museum president and CEO Waite Rawls admits he has taken heat for the decision. But he is adamant that the museum’s exterior “reunification promenade” is an exhibit and it is meant to show what its name implies, with row of flags from each of the Confederate states that ends with a much larger U.S. flag as a centerpiece.

Although the moths long ago had their way with the handsome grey officer’s coat belonging to Maj. Gen. Patrick Cleburne , it will be one of the star exhibits when the Museum of the Confederacy opens its new museum at Appomattox, Va. on March 31. Cleburne, sometimes called the Stonewall of the West, was wearing the high-collared coat when he was killed while attacking the Union breastworks at the Battle of Franklin , Nov. 30, 1864.