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. The next afternoon the Union left flank was fighting for Little Round Top a few hundred yards up the slope, and this farm became one of the places the wounded were brought. Pierce carried water to troops moving past on the first and second days and helped with the men laid out in the yard and the house while the surgeons worked. She wrote afterwards of a pile of amputated arms and legs outside, higher than the fence, and of picking her way among the bodies of the wounded to reach the door. General Stephen Weed died inside. Her account, published in 1889 as At Gettysburg, or What a Girl Saw and Heard of the Battle, is one of the fullest civilian records of those three days that exists. The detail worth carrying away is the decision that sent her here. It was the most careful choice available, and it moved her out of town directly into the second day of the battle. Meanwhile the house she had left on Baltimore Street took seventeen bullet holes in its upper balcony, with rounds passing through the rooms and the family sheltering in the cellar. There was no safe direction to send her.