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. When the family came back they found their fields and woods being used as a graveyard, with somewhere between five hundred and a thousand Confederate dead put into shallow trenches wherever the ground allowed. The burials had been done fast and badly by exhausted men. A Pennsylvania lawyer named John B. Linn, walking the ground weeks afterwards, wrote that the dead were so thinly covered you could feel a body by pressing the earth with your foot, and described a hand still above the surface by the Rose barn, weathered like an old buckskin glove. The Union dead were lifted within months and taken to the new national cemetery. The Confederate dead were not: no government was going to pay for them, and they stayed in the Rose fields until Rufus Weaver, whose father Samuel had superintended the Union reburials, took the work on between 1871 and 1873, largely on money raised by Southern women's memorial associations. Three summers to empty this farm, and not every grave was found.