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. Coster's men were outnumbered by roughly three to one and were flanked at both ends of their line by the Confederate brigades of Harry Hays and Isaac Avery. What that cost is legible in one regiment's figures: of about two hundred men of the 154th New York who went into the brickyard, one was killed, twenty one were wounded and one hundred and seventy eight were captured or missing. The brigade was swept out, and the retreat it covered got through. The battlefield association later bought less than three quarters of an acre of the site, a strip running back from North Stratton Street, and named it Coster Avenue. New York dedicated its monument to the 154th on 1 July 1890, the twenty seventh anniversary of the fight. It is one of the few pieces of the battlefield that sits inside the town rather than outside it, hemmed in by houses, and most visitors never find it.