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. The surgery was done in and around the barn, and the farm's orchard and its spring were what made the site workable at that scale. The best known man brought here was Confederate. Lewis Armistead led his brigade over the stone wall at the climax of Pickett's Charge on 3 July, went down a few yards beyond it, and was carried back through the Union lines to this hospital, where he died on the morning of 5 July in the summer kitchen. A Union field hospital treating the enemy's wounded was ordinary rather than remarkable: both armies left their casualties in each other's hands here on a scale nobody had planned for. The Spanglers went back to farming afterwards on land that had been used as a hospital and a burial ground. The barn, the stone house, the summer kitchen and the smokehouse all still stand and have been restored, which makes this one of the few places on this field where the subject is medicine rather than tactics.