A visit to Stephen Grove farm, site of Lincoln photos

The front door of the Stephen Grove farmhouse.

         PANORAMA: Some Confederate wounded were cared for in tents in a side yard.

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In early October 1862, the Union Army Fifth Corps—part of George McClellan's "bodyguard," a perturbed President Lincoln called it—camped in the fields surrounding Stephen Grove's impressive, brick farmhouse. On Oct. 3, the president—who had hoped to prod 'Little Mac" into action after Antietam—met with Michigan troops and posed in front of the house with McClellan and other Union Army brass for photographer Alexander Gardner.

More than two weeks after the battle, hundreds of wounded lay in makeshift hospitals or private homes throughout the area. (See here, here and here.)  At Grove's farm, Confederates cared for their wounded in the house, barn and yard. They buried their dead, including 28th Georgia Lieutenant Benjamin Brantley, in the woods behind Mount Airy, as Grove's house also was known. Union wounded also were cared for on Stephen and Maria Grove's property.

Surgeons used a rough-hewn table inside the house for operations. An area behind the barn, near a stone fence, became a dumping ground for amputated limbs. Surgeons in both armies shared quarters in Grove's attic, where they "ate together ... drank together, and had a high old time."

                         GOOGLE EARTH: View of Grove farm, near Sharpsburg, Md. 

Decades after Antietam, a Sharpsburg man named William Blackford, a boy at the time of the battle, told of scores of wounded Confederates at Grove's farm. He remembered a wounded soldier who lay near the kitchen door. The young North Carolinian talked about his mother and complained only of being cold. "Do you suppose that lady in the house would let me come into the kitchen and sit by the fire?" he said. He died the next day.

In 1934, a day after Blackford recounted that story to Fred Cross, the Massachusetts historian visited the Grove farm. When he told Blackford's account to the current "lady of the house," she invited Cross in and showed him the large kitchen fireplace. Then she took him to the parlor, lifted the rug, and pointed to a large bloodstain on the floor—evidence of a Civil War tragedy.

"I have washed and scrubbed that spot again and again until I had I have thought I got it all out," she told Cross, "but as soon as the floor dried that spot would reappear as plain as ever."

NOTE: The Grove farm is private property. Do not trespass.

               THEN & NOW of President Lincoln at Grove Farm. Larger version here.

The farmhouse was probably built by Philip Grove in 1821. Click here for more information.

The farmhouse, privately owned today,  is badly in need of repair.

Another view of the Stephen P. Grove farmhouse. Private property. Do not trespass.

     PANORAMA: V Corps of Union army camped in Grove's field in early October 1862.
               Pan to the right to see the long lane Lincoln used to reach the farmhouse.

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-- Have something to add, correct? E-mail me at jbankstx@comcast.net

SOURCES:

--Nelson, John H, As Grain Falls Before The Reaper, The Federal Hospital Sites And Identified Federal Casualties at Antietam, Privately published CD, Hagerstown, Md., 2004. (Nelson's outstanding work is the source for the description of the Grove farm's use as a hospital. He cites the source of that information, Stephen P. Grove's granddaughter, as the John Philemon Smith file in the Antietam National Battlefield Visitor's Center Library.)
--Hagerstown (Md.) Daily Mail, March 12, 1934.
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