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Monday, October 10, 2016
Antietam Then & Now: Pennsylvania artillery battery
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Thursday, October 06, 2016
Antietam Then & Now: 125th Pa. vets at Dunker Church in 1888
Wednesday, October 05, 2016
Antietam hospital scene: 'Hold my hand till I die'
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In 1862, this farm was owned by Dr. Otho J. Smith, whose property was used as a hospital for Union and Confederate wounded after the Battle of Antietam. On or about Sept. 20, 1862, Alexander Gardner shot four photographs at the farm, about a mile from the battlefield (see Google Earth view below), while wounded soldiers occupied Smith's barn and outbuildings. (See here, here, here and here.) Other wounded were cared for in makeshift tents covered with straw.
Elizabeth Harris, wife of a Philadelphia physician, and another nurse, Maria Hall, aided the wounded on Smith's farm, the division hospital for Union General William French. Harris described a heart-rending scene:
"... then came on to French's Division hospital, where were one thousand of our wounded, and a number of Confederates. The first night we slept in our ambulance; no room in the small house, the only dwelling near, could be procured. The next day was the Sabbath. The sun shone brightly; the bees and the birds were joyous and busy; a beautiful landscape spread out before us, and we knew the Lord of the Sabbath looked down upon us. But, with all these above and around us, we could see only our suffering, uncomplaining soldiers, mutilated, bleeding, dying. Almost every hour I witnessed the going out of some young life. No words can describe the wonderful endurance -- not a murmur, not a word of complaint or regret.
"Many such expressions as the following have been heard: 'Yes, I have struck my last blow for my country; whether I have served my country well others may judge. I know I love her more than life.' The lip quivered with emotion, and the face was full of meaning, as he added, 'I am done with all this, and must meet eternity. I have thought too little of the future. I had a praying mother. O that I might meet her!' Another, a mere youth, with full, round face and mild blue eyes, said, 'Hold my hand till I die. I am trying to think of my Saviour; but think of my mother and father; their hearts will break.' "Smith's farmhouse, barn and outbuildings were torn down about the turn of the 20th century. My friend Richard Clem, a Washington County (Md.) historian, told me that on sunny days, he saw broken glass from old medicine bottles glistening in this field -- further evidence of the farm's long-ago use as a hospital.
Cropped enlargements of the original Gardner image reveal interesting details:
Split-rail fences -- including a broken section ...
... a massive hay stack and a soldier apparently staring at Gardner and his camera ...
... and one of several tents covered with straw, a temporary shelter for wounded soldiers. Who knows what suffering took place there?
SOURCE:
-- Moore, Frank, Women of The War, Their Heroism and Self-Sacrifice, Hartford: S.S. Scranton & Co., 1866.
Sunday, October 02, 2016
The art of war: A double-rack 'organ' of Springfield muskets
We usually equate the implements of war with death and destruction. As this double-rack organ of 645 1861 Springfield muskets at the Springfield (Mass.) Armory National Historic Site shows, that need not always be the case. After muskets were assembled, this is the way they were stored back in the day. My dad, "Big Johnny" Banks, would have loved this. (Click on all images to enlarge.)
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Thursday, September 29, 2016
Antietam Then & Now: Confederate dead near Dunker Church
Monday, September 26, 2016
Antietam: A little-known tragedy at David Reel's barn
"While staying at Mr. Reels I saw a number of wounded and dead Confederates brought into the yard; some were having their limbs amputated, others horribly mangled were dying. One man in particular I shall never forget. His entire abdomen had been torn and mangled with a piece of exploded shell. He uttered piercing and heart rendering cries and besought those who stood by for God's sake to kill him and thus end his sufferings. Death came to his relief in a short time and he was hastily buried in a shallow grave dug in the orchard nearby."But sometime during the battle, an even greater horror occurred. Federal artillery struck the barn, setting it afire and burning to death some of the wounded. When local boys went through the ruins of the barn, they found lumps of lead ... and bones of human beings in the ashes. It's not known how many Confederate soldiers died in the barn fire.
"The fire of the Federal Batteries on this point was terrific," H.W. Addison, a captain in the 7th South Carolina of Kershaw's Brigade recalled decades after the battle. "I finallly got off some hundred of yards toward the Town," added Addison, "I looked back, and saw that the Barn or building had been fired, and suppose some of our wounded were burned to death."
During a visit to the farm on the 154th anniversary of the battle, the scene was quite different. Chickens clucked in the barn, and cows nervously stirred in a nearby field. I stepped through muck to find the general area where Alexander Gardner set up his camera to record an image of the burned-out shell of the barn on Sept. 21 or 22, 1862.
There wasn't another soul in sight.
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| An image of the Reel barn taken from a similar vantage point as Alexander Gardner's 1862 image. (CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE.) |
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| Two outer stone walls appear to be all that remains of the war-time barn. |
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| A close-up of an outer stone wall. |
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| Lower level of the barn. Was this hell on Sept. 17, 1862? |
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| A view of the length of the barn. The old Reel farm property is owned by the Civil War Trust. |
-- Buchanan, Jim, Walking the West Woods blog. (Buchanan cites H.W. Addison's 1898 letter to Ezra Carman, who wrote a detailed study of the battle, as source for the description of the shelling of the Reel farm and barn. Accessed Sept. 25, 2016.)
--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 terrific work is the source for the quote from John Philemon Smith. He cites the source as the Smith file in the Antietam National Battlefield Visitor's Center Library.)
--Reilly, Oliver T., The Battlefield of Antietam, Hagerstown Bookbinding and Printing Co., Hagerstown, Md., 1906.
Sunday, September 25, 2016
Antietam: Is this house where General Joseph Mansfield died?
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| 2000: During a renovation of the house, the current owner discovered log construction underneath. (Images showing log construction courtesy Marvin Diller) |
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| TODAY: The old Daniel Bovey house. The log portion of the house is behind the brick and to the right of the front porch. |
WARNING! FOR HISTORY GEEKS ONLY. :)
Three Union generals suffered mortal wounds at Antietam, and for students of the battle, the sites where two of them died are well known.
Israel Richardson, struck in the chest by an artillery shell fragment near the Sunken Road on the morning of Sept. 17, 1862, was taken to the Philip Pry farm, where a makeshift hospital had been set up in the barn and house. President Lincoln visited him in Pry's house in early October, and the general's wife Fannie and sister traveled from Michigan to help care for him there. But the 46-year-old officer -- "Fighting Dick," he was called because of his prowess on the battlefield -- died of complications from his wound on the second floor on Nov. 3, 1862. The beautiful, brick house is now home for excellent displays by the National Museum of Civil War Medicine.
Wounded in the chest during the IX Corps' afternoon attack, Isaac Rodman died on Sept. 30 in Henry Rohrbach's farm house, near Burnside Bridge. His wife Sally, who had traveled from Rhode Island, was by his side. Before his death, the smell of the 40-year-old brigadier general's wound became so offensive, according to a witness, that the dinner table was moved outside to the porch for meals. Privately owned, the Rohrbach house is inaccessible to the public.
Antietam proved to be the first and last Civil War field command for Joseph Mansfield, who had served far from major action until he was given the reins of the XII Corps only two days before the battle.
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| General Joseph Mansfield of Middletown, Conn., died of his Antietam wound on Sept. 18, 1862. (Middlesex County History Society) |
Line's two-story house, which measured about 26 feet by 22 feet, became known as the "White House Hospital," undoubtedly because the logs were painted white. A thousand wounded soldiers, including more than 100 Confederates, received care in his house and in the outbuildings on his farm.
Patrick Henry Flood, the 107th New York surgeon who came to Mansfield's aid after he was shot, feared the general would die before he even arrived at Line's farm. The bullet penetrated about "two inches from the nipple ... passing out at the back, near the shoulder blade," Flood wrote to Mansfield's wife, Louisa, in April 1863. (Read the complete letter on my blog here.) "The lung was much torn," the surgeon added, "and I saw at a glance the wound must prove fatal."
At 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 18, 1862, about 24 hours after Mansfield was shot, the 58-year-old officer from Middletown, Conn., died in a bedroom in Line's small house. Just off the gravel, war-time portion of Smoketown Road, a short distance from the site of Line's house, a small, black-and-white metal marker points to where Mansfield's life ended.
That sign is wrong.
Mansfield didn't die at noon on Sept. 17, and although he indeed died in the house on George Line's farm, the 1862 log house was long ago moved and forgotten.
Until now.
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| A sign just off Smoketown Road incorrectly notes the date and time of Mansfield's death. The log house in which the general died was purchased by Daniel Bovey, who moved it sometime during the 19th century and reassembled it on his nearby farm. |
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| This house on the site of George Line's log house was probably built after the Civil War. This is private property. Do not trespass. |
is in the grove of trees to the right of the long, thin outbuilding.
On a Saturday morning in Captain Bender's Tavern on Main Street in Sharpsburg Md., my friend John Rogers and I marveled at tales told by Richard Clem, who has a longtime passion for hunting for Civil War relics in area fields and woods. Clem pulled from a small case pieces of art made from lead by Civil War soldiers -- a VI Corps badge, a cannon tube and even a small, intricately carved walnut. A lifetime Washington County, Md., resident, Clem also has a remarkable knowledge of local history. The 78-year-old retired woodworker still fondly remembers his grandmother recounting visits with Civil War veterans, proving the war isn't as long ago as some of us might think.
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| An 1877 Washington County atlas shows the location of the old Daniel Bovey farm near Hooker Bridge, also known as Upper Bridge. |
And so we three history geeks hopped into Rogers' car to find out more about a footnote in history.
After a quick stop at the site of the old O.J. Smith farm/Civil War hospital on Mansfield Road near the battlefield, we drove a short distance before we made a right turn up a long, gravel lane. At the top of the hill, we saw a two-story brick house with a modern addition and a friendly dog. (See Google Earth view below.) In the far distance, we could barely make out the old Hooker Bridge (or Upper Bridge), named for the general whose I Corps marched across it on the way to battle. Richard knew the owner of the farm, Marvin Diller, who had an interesting story to tell. During renovation work on the house in 2000, he discovered a log structure beneath the brick exterior. He even had pictures to prove it. Each log was marked with Roman numerals, Diller said, which seemed odd a first.
A little local history lesson made sense of it all.
In 1906, O.T. Reilly authored The Battlefield of Antietam, a 32-page booklet of photos, stories and remembrances about the battle. Reilly, who claimed he witnessed the battle as a 5-year-old, was the first Antietam guide, serving as a battlefield expert for decades. In his booklet, the longtime area resident wrote this brief passage:
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| O.T. Reilly (Image courtesy Stephen Recker) |
The brick house that stands near the Hooker Bridge, on the southwest side, is the old log house that formerly belonged to George Line and was purchased by Mr. Bovey, removed, rebuilt and brick-cased, and was the house in which General Mansfield died. Mr. George Line built a new house on the site of the old one. The road to the left (southwest) of the Hooker Bridge was, during war times, only a private farm road, but now is a county road. The road to the right is the old road running through Bakersville to Williamsport; a portion of the army took this road before the battle to get on the right. All the buildings as you pass along were, for a short while, filled with wounded soldiers until they could be placed in the regular hospitals.A similar account, perhaps borrowed from Reilly, appeared in the regimental history of the 124th Pennsylvania, which bivouacked on Line's farm the night before the battle. Further evidence that Line's log house was moved comes from this 1996 survey by the Maryland Historical Trust, which noted the brick house on the property today "shows characteristics of later 19th century construction."
Bovey was Daniel R. Bovey, a local minister, farmer and longtime Keedysville, Md., resident. The exact date of his purchase of the house from Line is unknown, although it must have been before 1892, the year Bovey died. When Bovey reassembled the house on the hill near the Hooker Bridge, the Roman numerals on the logs evidently made reassembling it easier. The date the house was brick-cased, apparently a fairly common practice in Washington County, merits more research. Diller's property encompasses what was the old Bovey farm, which is shown in the 1877 Washington County atlas.
The available evidence seems to add up -- the house Mansfield died in has indeed survived the ravages of time.
Whether Mansfield died in his house or on Mars, it doesn't really make a difference to Diller. When I asked him how he felt living where a Civil War general died, he looked me in the eye and smiled.
"We don't even think about it," he said.
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| A 1906 reunion of the Bovey family at the family farm. An arrow points to Mary Ann Bovey, Daniel's wife. Daniel Bovey died in 1892. (Courtesy Bovey descendant) CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE. |
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| Another view of the log construction of what once was George Line's house... |
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| ... and the same view today. The current owner of the house, Marvin Diller (blue pants), appears at right. |
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| View from the front of the house. The Hooker Bridge. or Upper Bridge, crosses Antietam Creek in the middle distance. |
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| A brick on the house designates the year it was renovated. |
Have something to add (or correct) in this post? E-mail me here.
SOURCES:
--Find a Grave
--Hagerstown Daily Mail, Feb. 16, 1934. Description of Rodman's offensive wounds comes from Fred Cross, a military archivist at the Massachusetts Archives, who was told the story by area resident Jacob McGraw. McGraw helped Rohrbach clean up his property after the battle.
--Maryland Historical Trust, Inventory of Historic Properties, accessed online Sept. 25, 2016.
--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 excellent work is source for description of Line's farm as the "White House Hospital" and dimensions of Line's log house. He cites The Medical Department of the United States Army in the Civil War by Louis Duncan, published early in the 20th century, as source for number of wounded treated at the Line Farm. He cites Dr. Elisha Hunt's "Report on Field Hospitals Indicated on Map of Battlefield of Antietam" for note on Confederate wounded treated at Line farm. Harris was in charge of distribution of supplies by the United States Sanitary Commission.)
--Dr. Patrick Henry Flood letter to Louisa Mansfield, April 28, 1863, Middlesex County Historical Society, Middletown, Conn.
--Reilly, Oliver T., The Battlefield of Antietam, Hagerstown Bookbinding and Printing Co., Hagerstown, Md., 1906
Tuesday, September 20, 2016
Antietam video: A visit to David R. Miller farmhouse
Saturday, September 17, 2016
A visit to Stephen Grove farm, site of Lincoln photos
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| The front door of the Stephen Grove farmhouse. |
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."
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.
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.
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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| The farmhouse was probably built by Philip Grove in 1821. Click here for more information. |
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| The farmhouse, privately owned today, is badly in need of repair. |
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| Another view of the Stephen P. Grove farmhouse. Private property. Do not trespass. |
Pan to the right to see the long lane Lincoln used to reach the farmhouse.
-- 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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Wednesday, September 14, 2016
10 Antietam stories of courage, perseverance and death
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| Sunrise at Antietam from Rodman Avenue. |
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| George Marsh |
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| Philo Pearce |
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| John W. Hilldrup |
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| Samuel Gould |
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| Francis Mobley |
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| Jarvis Blinn |
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| Bela Burr |
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| Maria Hall |
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| G. Chamberlain |
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| Henry Adams |
Click here for all Battle of Antietam posts on my blog | Antietam interactive panoramas
Saturday, September 10, 2016
Harvard senior's death at Antietam: 'Known but to be loved'
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| An enlargement of an image of Samuel Shelton Gould, a 13th Massachusetts private. (Blogger's collection) |
It wasn't his fault.
A new recruit -- he had just joined the regiment days earlier straight from Harvard, where he was a member of the senior class -- the private wasn't supplied a musket. Assigned to be a stretcher-bearer, he picked up a weapon from another soldier in his regiment who fell wounded in the awful chaos during the Battle of Antietam on Sept. 17, 1862. His war that morning was brief. Shot through the heart, Gould apparently lingered a short time before he died.
“Samuel S. Gould stood within five feet of me when he was mortally wounded," Warren H. Freeman of Gould's Company A wrote to his father. "He had been in the company but four or five days. He was fresh from Harvard College, and I got quite well acquainted with him; he was a wide-awake, noble fellow, about as tall as I am.
"He has relatives in West Cambridge. We had forty-one men in our company, twenty-one of whom were killed or wounded. My rifle was so hot that I could hardly touch the barrel with my hand, but it worked well; that was the reason I was able to fire so many rounds. Some of the boys only fired thirty times; their rifles got foul, and it took a long time to load. After I had fired forty rounds I went to Gould and got some of his cartridges; he was living, but not able to speak; he died before the battle was over. " (Hat tip: Brad Forbush's excellent 13th Massachusetts web site.)
Only 19, Gould had already led a remarkable life before he was shot near the East Woods, once an unremarkable woodlot but now etched into Civil War history. Well-educated, he came from a prominent Boston-area family. His father, Samuel Sr., was once the headmaster at the Winthrop School in Boston, and young Samuel attended prep school at Roxbury Latin School, founded in 1645. Its distinguished roll-call of alumni included a founder of Yale, a Revolutionary War general, the founder of Harvard's Medical School and a clergyman credited with the stirring, revolutionary phrase "no taxation without representation."
Gould was only 15 when he enrolled at Harvard in 1858, but he remained there only a year before he sought a new adventure. Eager to prove himself, he became a common sailor -- his parents stunningly gave their approval -- and sailed aboard the Peabody, a ship involved in trade with Australia. After becoming dissatisfied with that experience, he finagled a position aboard the Commonwealth, a vessel destined for Peru.
(Click at upper right for full-screen experience.)
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| East Woods at Antietam, near where Samuel Gould was mortally wounded. |
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| 13th Massachusetts attacked toward the camera on the morning of Sept. 17, 1862. |
When the Commonwealth arrived in Callao, the South American country's chief seaport, the headstrong Gould discovered its eventual destination was the Chincha Islands, a dismal cluster of small islands off Peru's southwest coast. The mission: hauling a load of guano -- excrement of bats and birds that were used in the production of fertilizer and gunpowder. The islands, Gould's biography noted, were "a place to which sailors will never go if it can be avoided, as the work is of the most repulsive kind."
Highly perturbed, Gould met with the Commonwealth captain, seeking a discharge. The captain refused, forcing the young sailor to seek out the American consul in Callao. Eventually, the disagreement was settled with fisticuffs. The captain and his second mate pummeled the teenager, who wisely decided that night to leave the ship "at all hazards."
In Callao, Gould was offered a position on the Rival, a Boston-based ship that sailed to Ireland, making an extremely rough passage around Cape Horn. The 45-day voyage was unpleasant, and the work for Gould was "incessant and severe," but at least he got along with his commanding officers.
After a stay in Cork, Ireland, Gould sailed to New Orleans and finally to Boston, narrowly escaping death when the Rival was battered in a terrible storm off the coast of North Carolina.
Somehow while he sailed the globe for two years, Gould, an excellent student, found time to hit the books. "He carried with him from Boston several Latin and Greek text-books, and other books for reading and study, intending to use them in his spare hours, so as to re-enter College on his return with as little delay as possible," the Harvard biography noted.
"...the force of his example and fire of his words were inspiring."
"He addressed himself particularly to the more respectable young men," the Boston Gazette reported 11 days after Gould's death, "who were holding back from enlistment, he feared, on the ground of not wanting to mingle with the common classes, saying, that if such were their motives, 'they were not fit to have their names borne on that immortal roll of honor, the list of killed and wounded.' "
"... the force of his example and fire of his words" at the war meetings, his Harvard biography noted, "were inspiring."
Days after Antietam, Gould's remains were returned to Cambridge, Mass., where a service was held in his father's house. The president of Harvard excused the entire senior class on the day of his funeral -- and all those classmates "walked in mournful procession behind his remains." Gould was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, near Harvard's campus.
A little more than a week after Gould's death, the senior class left no doubt how it felt about its classmate, adopting four resolutions. One of them read:
"...although he had been but a year among us, yet during his short stay we had learned to love and honor him; for he was known but to be loved. Noble and generous-hearted, he shrank from everything that was selfish; and the instances are not few which remain of his disinterested generosity and quiet benevolence -- that his life, though short, was yet long enough to afford us a pattern of virtue, of patriotism, of duty, and of high resolve."
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| A salt print of Gould from the 1863 Harvard yearbook. (Blogger's collection) |
Have something to add (or correct) in this post? E-mail me here.
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