Battlefield panoramas: Antietam and Gettysburg

An iPhone and dermandar.com allow us to display pretty cool interactive panoramas of Civil War battlefields. The top panorama, of course, is iconic Bloody Lane at Antietam; the second panorama is of Crystal Spring farm, the seldom-visited site of the Union army's IX Corps hospital near the battlefield. In the first Gettysburg pano below, I walked down the slope of Barlow's Knoll to get a Rebel's-eye view of the attack that crushed the 17th Connecticut on July 1, 1863. The bottom image, taken on a cool spring morning near the crest of Culp's Hill, is from the perspective of the Union army, which defended it from July 1-3, 1863. Click on the top right of each image for an enlargement, and check out more interactive panoramas of Antietam, Gettysburg  and other Civil War battlefields on my blog. (Be warned: Staring intently at these four panos can make you woozy. Make them stop moving!) 

Three Lockwood brothers perished during war

28th Connecticut Private Sherman Lockwood's grave in
  Memphis (Tenn.) National Cemetery.
(Photo: Bruce and Wendy Linz)

When the 28th Connecticut left the brutally hot and pestilent conditions in Louisiana for home on Aug. 7, 1863, soldiers in the regiment were so sick that they could barely make it aboard the boat for the first leg of the journey on the Mississippi River. Some even died as they reached the deck of the steamer. Suffering from chronic diarrhea, two brothers in the regiment begged one of their comrades to help them.

“They were very anxious to get home,” Pvt. Louis Scofield recalled years later about Andrew and Sherman Lockwood. “As I was assisting the doctor, I tried to get them through. He said they were too weak and it would be impossible.” On Aug. 13, 1863, Sherman and Andrew were among the 25 to 30 soldiers in the regiment who were hospitalized in Memphis, Tenn., one of the stops along the Mississippi. But the brothers were indeed too ill to survive. Andrew, 30, died at Union Hospital on Aug. 27, 1863, two weeks before Sherman, 23, perished in the same hospital.

After he had re-enlisted in the 6th Connecticut on Christmas Eve 1863, James Lockwood visited his financially-strapped parents in Stamford, Conn., while on furlough in 1864 and gave his mother a present of $20. It was the last time Lydia and Sherman Lockwood saw him. After he was captured at Bermuda Hundred, Va., on June 17, 1864, James, a 22-year-old private, spent nearly four months in prisoner-of -war camps in Andersonville, Ga., and Florence, S.C. Emaciated, he could barely walk when he left Andersonville, according to a 6th Connecticut comrade, and died from effects of starvation in Florence on Oct. 2, 1864.

Buried in Memphis (Tenn.) National Cemetery, Sherman is the only Lockwood brother with a marked grave.

SOURCES

-- Scofield, Loomis, History of the Twenty-Eighth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers, (New Canaan, Conn., New Canaan Advertiser, 1915), Page 15.
James Lockwood pension file, National Archives.

Furniture with Antietam tie purchased by Hartford museum

The "Antietam" secretary in Harold Gordon's living room.

The front of the secretary includes the word "Antietam" and the date of the battle.

John Bingham (left) was killed at Antietam. 
His brother, Wells,  survived. 
 (Photos courtesy Military Historical Image Bank)

UPDATE: The Antietam secretary in this post was exposed in 2018 as a forgery.

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Three years ago, I visited a Massachusetts antiques dealer named Harold Gordon, who loved to talk about the Civil War and one of his recent purchases: a Victorian-era secretary with a direct tie to the Battle of Antietam. The unique piece of furniture was a gift from 16th Connecticut veterans to Wells Bingham in memory of his 17-year-old brother, John, a private in the regiment who was killed in the battle. Also a private in the 16th Connecticut, Wells survived Antietam unscathed physically.

In his cramped living room that day, Harold delighted in showing me details of the 8-foot antique secretary -- the beautiful clock atop it that includes the words "The Union Preserved" near the base; a small tin on the front that may have held a piece of the 16th Connecticut regimental flag that was at Antietam and a door that when opened played "Yankee Doodle Dandy" on a music box. Spelled out in cattle bone on the front of the one-of-a-kind gift are the words "Antietam" and "Sept. 17, 1862," as well as John F. Bingham's name.

Does this case on the front of the secretary
 hold a piece of the 16th Connecticut flag 
that was at Antietam? 

Only 16 at Antietam, Wells wrote of the news of his brother's death in a heart-rending, seven-page letter to his father that I discovered in the Antietam National Battlefield Library months after I visited with Harold. It was the first letter I saw in a stack of transcripts and other copies of letters from Connecticut soldiers about Antietam.  "John, poor, poor John, is no more," Wells wrote about his brother's death to Elisha Bingham in East Haddam, Conn. Added the teenager: "You can imagine my fealings [sic] better than I can describe them." I wrote about the Bingham brothers and the secretary in my book, Connecticut Yankees at Antietam.

Today, the story of the secretary came full circle for me when a reader of the blog pointed out that it had been purchased by Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum Museum from a Woodbridge, Conn., antiques dealer, who had purchased it from Gordon. I have no idea what the museum, which plans to display the secretary this summer, paid for it, but the asking price at a winter antiques show in New York was $375,000. Not a bad chunk of change.  I've lost touch with Harold since we inspected the 16th Connecticut flag at the Hall of Flags at the State Capitol Building in Hartford nearly two years ago during our small-time investigative effort to solve the mystery of whether a piece of it really was in the tin on his secretary. (Don't descend into that deep rabbit hole.) I imagine that he's quite pleased that the amazing piece of folk art that once dominated his living room will soon be seen by a much wider audience in the state where the Bingham brothers' story began.

Harold Gordon (right) inspects the 16th Connecticut flag at the Hall of Flags
 at the State Capitol Building in Hartford.

Antietam: Odds & ends from spring visit to Miller farmhouse

A photo of the David R. Miller farmhouse on a picturesque spring day at the Antietam battlefield ...

... was taken from a similar vantage point as this Alexander Gardner image of the house on Sept. 19, 1862, two days after the battle ...

... in this odd image, the interior of the Miller farmhouse appears in disarray while a reflection in the window shows the back yard where the Iron Brigade crossed on Sept. 17, 1862.

... the well-worn steps of the back porch. How many soldiers trod on these stones during the battle?

... and the view from the back porch includes the Old Hagerstown Pike. The Union army moved up this road on the morning of the bloodiest day in American history.

Antietam: Inside the German Reformed Church hospital

Captain Henry Sand of the 103rd New York
died at the German Reformed Church hospital.
(New York State Military Museum)

A post Sunday included images of the beautiful Connecticut windows in the church on Main Street in Sharpsburg, Md., that was used as a hospital after the Battle of Antietam. Here are two interactive panoramas that I shot Saturday afternoon of the interior of what once was the German Reformed Church hospital. Now the Christ Reformed Church, the small, red-brick building has undergone at least two renovations since the Civil War.

If you were to step back in time to late September 1862, you'd see wounded soldiers on wooden planks, which were placed across the pews. Parishioners aided the overtaxed doctors, who treated terribly wounded soldiers whose stumps needed to be drained of pus and cleared of maggots and flies. Amputated limbs were tossed out the windows. Some wounded may have been placed in the balcony, which no longer exists. 

An Irish-born surgeon named Edward McDonnell kept a casebook in which he detailed the treatment of  wounded here. On Oct. 30, 1862, he witnessed the death of a horribly wounded New York officer, whose thigh had been mangled by Rebel artillery. "He was able to speak to within an hour or so of his death," the surgeon wrote of 25-year-old Captain Henry Sand of the 103rd New York, "and thus passed to another, and I believe better, world."

Antietam Up Close: Beautiful Connecticut church windows

One of the more awe-inspiring scenes at the Antietam isn't on the battlefield. It's in a seldom-visited church on Main Street in Sharpsburg, Md. -- a church that after the battle was used as a hospital by the Union army. When the sun hits the stained-glass windows just right in the small, red-brick building, it can take your breath away. The windows were donated in 1891 by veterans of the 16th Connecticut, whose comrades were treated (and some of whom died) at the church hospital after the battle. I've written about the German Reformed Church hospital many times, including here, here and here. I shot these up-close images during a short visit on Saturday afternoon to the church, now called the Christ Reformed Church, which celebrated its 250th anniversary last year.

Antietam: A horrible toll for the 16th Connecticut

Fragile document in the Connecticut State Library archives: Monthly returns for 
October 1862 for the 16th Connecticut.

A 30-year-old cigar maker, Henry Barnett went into battle singing
at Antietam. He was killed there on Sept. 17, 1862.

In a recent post, I included an image of the October 1862 monthly returns for the 8th Connecticut that showed the staggering death toll for the regiment at the Battle of Antietam. On Tuesday, I discovered in the Connecticut State Library archives the monthly returns for October 1862 for the 16th Connecticut. It's equally stunning to see on paper the toll that Antietam took on this green regiment, mainly recruited from Hartford County. The above image, slightly cut off on the right, includes the grunts -- the privates, corporals and sergeants. Some were listed as missing, others as having deserted. Thirty soldiers are listed as killed in action, far less than the final death count of 75. (Many of the wounded died in Sharpsburg, Md.-area hospitals after the battle.)

The battle took a steep toll on 16th Connecticut officers, too. Captains Newton Manross, Samuel Brown, John Drake and Frederick Barber were among those either killed or mortally wounded at Antietam.

Many of the soldiers on this list have been written about on my blog. Orderly Sergeant Wadsworth Washburn (No. 52), the son of a minister from Berlin, Conn., was killed in John Otto's cornfield. His father recovered his remains from the battlefield. Sergeant Edward A. Parmele (No. 28), an aspiring dentist from Hartford, was engaged to be married to Washburn's sister. Henry Barnett, soldier No. 27 on the list, was a 30-year-old cigar maker from Suffield. He left behind a pregnant wife and two children. Private Nelson Snow (No. 28), also of Suffield, was sick the day of the battle, but he fought anyway. "(Snow) went into the fight for fear someone would call him a coward," wrote Sergeant William Relyea, a comrade in Company D. "He was brave enough to die."

(Download my Excel spreadsheet of Connecticut Antietam deaths here. It includes name, rank, company, date of death, personal information for soldiers and more. Can't download it? E-mail me and I'll send you a copy.)

SOURCE

Relyea, William Henry. “The History of the 16th Connecticut Volunteers,” MS 72782, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Conn.