The Trostle Barn

Look at the south side of this brick barn and there is a hole punched through it by a shell, left unrepaired since 2 July 1863. It is the most direct piece of physical evidence on the battlefield of what happened in this farmyard. Late that afternoon the Union Third Corps line was disintegrating in the Peach Orchard and the Wheatfield, and Captain John Bigelow's 9th Massachusetts Battery was ordered to hold the Trostle farmyard at all hazards, with no support, to buy the time the army needed to build a new line on Cemetery Ridge. Bigelow put his six Napoleons in the yard and fought them until the 21st Mississippi came over the rise and into the guns. Twenty seven of his men were killed or wounded, about eighty of the battery's horses were shot down, four of the six guns were left behind, and Bigelow himself was hit. The time he bought was enough. Freeman McGilvery got a scratch line of artillery formed behind him, and the Confederate advance stopped short of the ridge. Alexander Gardner's photographers reached this yard a few days later and made the images of the dead artillery horses lying in their traces where the teams had gone down. Those photographs did a great deal to fix in the public mind what a battlefield actually looked like. The Trostles, who had fled, came home to the horses, the wreckage and the hole in the brickwork.