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. When those attacks failed on 2 and 3 July, the wounded came back down the slope to this farm, and it became a Confederate field hospital: officers in the house, the rank and file in the barn. Farms pressed into hospital service were stripped as a matter of course. Doors were lifted off their hinges here to serve as operating tables and furniture was broken up for firewood, and Daniel Lady afterwards filed a claim for the damage, one of many across the county. It was denied. Most of what had been done to his property was done by Confederate troops, and Pennsylvania would not pay for that. The barn still carries initials cut into its woodwork by men who were carried into it, preserved now under glass, among them BAR of the 23rd Virginia and ABE of the 3rd North Carolina. The preservation group that has owned the farm since 1999 also points to staining in the house floorboards as surgical. The claim to weigh is the initials, which are physical, legible, and signed.