Local Stories in Pennsylvania
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Military·Adams County
Camp Colt
In 1918 the fields that Pickett's Charge crossed were covered in tents again, this time by the United States Tank Corps. Camp Colt was the army's first tank training centre, roughly a hundred and ninety two acres spread over the open ground on both sides of the Emmitsburg Road, on land already flat, already cleared and already held for the battlefield park. Its commander was a 27 year old captain named Dwight Eisenhower, and it was his first independent command.
Military·Adams County
Camp Letterman
For four months in 1863 the largest tent hospital of the war stood in a field beside the York Pike, a mile and a half east of Gettysburg. The armies marched away in early July and left about twenty one thousand wounded men behind them, scattered through barns, churches and farmhouses for miles in every direction.
Military·Adams County
Daniel Lady Farm
This stone farmhouse, built in 1822, and the bank barn added twenty years later sat directly behind the Confederate left for two days of the battle, and what happened here was not fighting but its aftermath. Richard Ewell's Second Corps occupied the ground on 1 July 1863, and Edward Johnson's division used the farm as headquarters and staging while his brigades formed in the fields for the attacks on Culp's Hill.
Military·Adams County
George Spangler Farm
The Spangler family farmed a hundred and sixty six acres here behind Cemetery Ridge, far enough back to be out of the fighting and close enough to be useful, which is how the property became the Eleventh Corps field hospital. Wounded men were carried here from 1 July 1863 onward and laid in the barn, in the outbuildings and across the fields around them. More than nineteen hundred passed through.
Military·Adams County
Home Of A Rebel Sharpshooter
One of the most reproduced photographs of the Civil War was taken at Devil's Den on 6 July 1863, and it was staged. Alexander Gardner and his assistant Timothy O'Sullivan titled it Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter: a young Confederate lying behind a neat stone barricade in the rocks, rifle propped beside him, apparently killed at his post. It is a composition, and every part of it that makes it work was arranged.
Military·Adams County
John Burns
John Burns was 69 years old, a former constable of Gettysburg with a reputation for being difficult, and on 1 July 1863 he put on his coat, picked up an old flintlock musket and a powder horn and walked west out of town toward the sound of the fighting. He was the only civilian resident of Gettysburg known to have taken up arms in the battle.
Military·Adams County
Kuhn's Brickyard
The Eleventh Corps got off the field on the first day of Gettysburg because of a stand made in a brickyard on a back street, and it lasted less than half an hour. On the afternoon of 1 July 1863 the corps was collapsing north of town. Colonel Charles Coster's brigade was sent forward into John Kuhn's five acre brickyard, a lot fenced with rails and set with a wooden barn and dome shaped kilns, to buy time for the rest of the corps to get back through the streets to Cemetery Hill.
History·Adams County
Lincoln Cemetery
The Black labourers of Gettysburg found, dug up and carried in most of the Union dead who lie in the Soldiers' National Cemetery, and could not be buried there themselves. This ground on Long Lane is where they went instead. It was established in 1867 by the Sons of Good Will, a Black benevolent society, and roughly thirty veterans of the United States Colored Troops lie here, along with more than four hundred other members of the town's Black community.
Military·Adams County
The Bliss Farm
There is nothing here now, and that is the point. William Bliss's farm stood in the open ground between Seminary Ridge and Cemetery Ridge, which put it squarely in the space between two armies. His barn was a large brick one, and a brick barn in no man's land is a fortress: Confederate marksmen worked from its windows and loopholes on 2 July 1863 and made the Union line on Cemetery Ridge expensive to hold.
Military·Adams County
The First Shot
The battle began here, about three miles west of Gettysburg, at roughly half past seven on the morning of 1 July 1863. Lieutenant Marcellus Jones of the 8th Illinois Cavalry was on picket at the Ephraim Wisler house, where the Chambersburg Pike crosses Knoxlyn Ridge, when Confederate infantry appeared on the road ahead. By his own account he borrowed a carbine from his sergeant, rested it on a fence rail for steadiness, and fired at a mounted officer at long range.
Military·Adams County
The Jacob Weikert Farm
At about one in the afternoon on 1 July 1863, with the fighting already audible north of town, a neighbour named Hettie Schriver set out for her father's farm three miles down the Taneytown Road and asked whether the Pierces' fifteen year old daughter might come along, out of harm's way. Her parents agreed. The daughter was Tillie Pierce, the farm was Jacob Weikert's, and it sits directly behind the Round Tops.
Military·Adams County
The Rose Farm
George Rose's farm took the heaviest concentrated fighting of 2 July 1863, and then it took the burials. The Wheatfield, Rose Woods and the ground up to Sherfy's peach orchard were all on or beside this property, and more than twenty thousand men were engaged across that fighting in an afternoon. George owned the place; his brother John lived on it with his wife Elizabeth and their seven children.
Military·Adams County
The Trostle Barn
Look at the south side of this brick barn and there is a hole punched through it by a shell, left unrepaired since 2 July 1863. It is the most direct piece of physical evidence on the battlefield of what happened in this farmyard. Late that afternoon the Union Third Corps line was disintegrating in the Peach Orchard and the Wheatfield, and Captain John Bigelow's 9th Massachusetts Battery was ordered to hold the Trostle farmyard at all hazards, with no support, to buy the time the army needed to…
History·Adams County
Where Lincoln Stood
The most asked question on this battlefield is where Lincoln stood to give the Gettysburg Address, and it is still open. For a century the answer was assumed to be here, at the Soldiers' National Monument, dedicated in 1869 in the middle of the burial semicircle. The assumption was never based on much. When the Lincoln Address Memorial went up in 1912 its own plaque quietly declined to make the claim, saying the address was delivered about three hundred yards from that spot.