THE CITIZENS OF GETTYSBURG

TOWN OF GETTYSBURG IN 1863

In 1863, Gettysburg had nearly 450 buildings and almost 2,400 inhabitants. The railroad had arrived in 1858, and the railroad station had been built on Carlisle Street in 1859. Gettysburg’s economy was built around the carriage industry, but farms and warehouses were also important. The Gettysburg Railroad was very good for business as it made getting local products to new markets easier.

The town had six hotel and tavern establishments. There were seven churches in Gettysburg, all of which would be used as hospitals during the battle. On July 1-3, 1863, 163,000 men and 15,000 animals invaded the town and fields.

Men fought and died in the streets. Many back yards surrounded by high board fences that restricted troop movements and trapped soldiers. Lots were deep and narrow, and generally contained a stable or carriage house, a well, a privy, and a kitchen garden. For two and a half days, the town was occupied by an invading army of Confederates.

Citizens became civilians in danger of the deadly missiles of war. When the armies departed, about 21,000 helpless wounded needed care. Corpses littered sidewalks, porches, and backyard flower gardens. Resident, Jennie Wade, lay dead, and every citizen was traumatized. Homes were wrecked, riddled by artillery and musketry. Crops were destroyed, barns burned, and miles of fence leveled with livestock slaughtered or driven off. The stench of death hung everywhere.

JOHN BURNS

JOHN BURNS was a 69 year old veteran of the War of 1812 who lived on Chambersburg Street. A cobbler by trade, he also served at the town’s constable. On July 1, 1863, he decided to take up arms and go up against the Rebels personally, so he took up his musket and joined the Union troops on McPherson Ridge. During the battle he fought with the 150th PA and the 7th Wisconsin. Wounded three times in the legs, he was brought home to his wife, Barbara, by a neighbor. There he was left in peace by Confederate occupiers of the town.

BURNS became a national hero after the battle and was the first resident of the town that President Abraham Lincoln stated he wished to meet during his trip to dedicate the Soldiers' National Cemetery that November.

ELIZABETH SALOME “SALLIE” MYERS

SALLIE MYERS was a 21 year-old Gettysburg schoolteacher and assistant principal who still lived at home with her family on the north side of West High Street, just off Baltimore Street. Her father was a justice of the peace.

When the wounded and dying began seeking shelter in the homes and buildings of Gettysburg, SALLIE MYERS put the nursing skills she had been taught to good use.

At her first sight of a wounded soldier, SALLIE MYERS fled the hospital in the Catholic Church in West High Street, soon after entering as a volunteer nurse. She ran back outside and collapsed on the front steps, uncontrollably convulsed with sobs.

Slowly regaining her composure, she reentered and embarked upon a two week stint without a break, caring for the helpless in the church and later in her home a half block to the west. SALLIE also provided food and nursing assistance at Camp Letterman Hospital after the battle ended.

When the brother of a soldier who had died in her care came to claim his body after the battle, she married him and became Mrs. Harry F. Stewart.

CARRIE SHEADS

MISS CARRIE SHEADS was principal of Oakridge Seminary, located a short distance west of the village. On June 30, Buford’s cavalry camped on the Chambersburg Pike, about 200 yards from her school. The next morning, the battle was raging a few hundred yards from her door, and she had no time to get the girls in her charge to a place of safety.

The buildings of Oakridge Seminary were soon used as a hospital, and she found herself and her girls caring for 72 wounded soldiers. During the battle, the Seminary was hit in more than 60 places, with two shells passing entirely through it.

The Sheads’ home sat on the Chambersburg Pike at the western edge of Gettysburg. Toward it on the afternoon of July first, came the brunt of the Union retreat. A group of Union soldiers from the 97th New York veered off and sought shelter at this house standing by itself out in the fields adjacent to the Chambersburg Pike. Colonel Wheelock led the group of soldiers.

The house was filled with wounded Union soldiers , and when Colonel Wheelock entered the house, he went immediately down into the basement. A few moments later, Confederate soldiers barged into the house and they began to disarm the Union officers, demanding their sidearms.

Colonel Wheeler took out his sword, which had been given to him by his friends earlier in the war. The sword is a symbol of honor, and he refused to let the sword fall into Confederate hands.

CARRIE SHEADS distracted the Confederate officer by directing him to look outside for a moment. When he wasn’t looking, she hid the sword in the folds of her petticoat.

Colonel Wheelock was forever indebted to CARRIE for the deed she performed on his behalf in the basement that afternoon of July first.

In their own house, CARRIE SHEADS and her sisters became nurses to dozens of seriously wounded men. The war had come to CARRIE’S parlor, but it also took her brothers, who were Union soldiers. The tragedy in that family is that though she had four brothers, two were killed in action during the Civil War in various battles. The other two came home but did not live long because of service-connected disabilities.

Carrie’s sister, Louisa, married one of her Union Army patients, but she also died shortly after the Civil War, perhaps as a result of her work as a nurse in the field hospital that occupied their home. They claim that it was from the effects of formaldehyde. That means that four brothers and one sister were casualties in that one family.

MARY MCALLISTER

MARY MCALLISTER supported herself by re-selling to the townsfolk bacon and other cured meats that she obtained from area farmers. She lived on Chambersburg Street with sister, Martha, who was married to Joseph Scott. The Scott’s son, Hugh, ran a telegraph office from the first floor of his parents’ house. It is very likely that the sisters had a garden as most townsfolk did, and that they stored and preserved vegetables and other foods as the process of the day permitted.

On the first day of the battle, she handed out cups of water to Union soldiers as they raced down Chambersburg Street toward the battle. Later she helped to care for 140 wounded soldiers (from both armies) in Christ Lutheran Church on Chambersburg Street, across the street from her home.

MARY recalled that “Every pew was full; some sitting, some lying, some leaning on others.”

She also mentioned that an artillery shell struck the roof of the church on July 1st.

She recalled, “I gathered up sheets and water and Mrs. Nancy Weikert and I went the church and we went to work. They carried the wounded in there as fast as they could. We took the cushions off the seats and some officers came in and said, ‘Lay them in the aisles.’ Then we did all we could for the wounded men... wetting cloths and putting them on the wounds.”

DAVID AND FANNY BUEHLER

One of David McConaughy’s closest friends and business associates, DAVID BUEHLER was also an attorney and the town’s postmaster. When first word of Confederates approaching reached him, he and his wife, Fanny, thought it was another false alarm. Then David saw Confederates at the end of Chambersburg Street. Fanny met him with a satchel packed with valuable government property and a valise of clothes. He left on the run as the Rebels turned on Baltimore Street from the Diamond. He escaped to Hanover and then to his wife’s family’s home in New Jersey.

FANNY BUEHLER spent the battle alone with her youngest child. (Her other children had been sent out of town to stay with her family.) In her memoir which was written in 1896, she tells of Confederate soldiers entering her house at 112 Baltimore Street, and she writes of taking care of wounded Union soldiers in her home.

SARAH BROADHEAD

SARAH BROADHEAD was 30 years old and lived with her husband Joseph and daughter Mary on the western end of Chambersburg Street. Her husband was an employee of the Gettysburg Railroad. During the three days of the battle, she, her child, and several neighbors, anxiously spent long, dark hours in the cellar of harness maker, David Troxell.

Beginning on June 15, 1863, SARAH began keeping a journal. Her detailed chronicle provides insight into the battle and its aftermath that would have otherwise been lost to history. After the Federal victory, SARAH helped care for the wounded in a local hospital located in the Lutheran Theological Seminary, and in her home. Her account of this experience was deeply personal. She described feeling overwhelmed upon seeing so many injured, helpless and hungry in dirty hospital wards.

Repulsed by the suffering she saw around her, but compelled to try to help, SARAH continued her work in the hospital and noted a change in her own fortitude. Some weeks since I would have fainted had I seen as much blood as I have to-day, but I am proof now, only caring to relieve suffering."

Days after the battle SARAH stated, "I am becoming more used to sights of misery. We do not know until we are tried what we are capable of doing.”

The Lutheran Theological Seminary had served as a hospital from the first day of battle, and perhaps as may as 400-500 men had been brought there. SARAH came out there a couple of days after the battle to do whatever she could do to help. There had been heavy rain as the battle was ending, and she went downstairs to find the helpless men in water, and she was fearful that they would drown.

According to SARAH, “Men wounded in three or four places, not able to help themselves in the least, lay almost swimming in water.”

SARAH realized that she had to get the men out of there, so she enlisted the help of another woman and some nurses, and they carried all of those men, nearly a hundred of them, up to the fourth floor of the Seminary building. It is certain that it was a very painful experience for those men to be moved at all when some of them had probably not been treated, but it may well have helped save some lives.

At about the same time, about 4,000 men in the Second Corps hospital were lying out on a hillside along a creek. The rains got so bad that the creek flooded and washed away ten, fifteen, or twenty of these men to their deaths because they were just lying on the ground, unable to move on their own.

PETER AND ELIZABETH THORN

At the time of the Battle of Gettysburg ELIZABETH was caretaker of Evergreen Cemetery, the job normally performed by her husband Peter who was serving with the 138th Pennsylvania. She had her parents, Catherine and John Masser age 63, and her three sons: Fred age 7, George age 5, and John age 2, all living with her in the cemetery gatehouse. ELIZABETH was also six months pregnant.

As the war began and as late as June of 1863, ELIZABETH was able to keep up with the volume of burials coming her way, which averaged about five interments per month.

Things would change drastically after the Battle of Gettysburg a month later. On July 5, she received a visit from David McConaughy, the Cemetery President. He directed her to start burying the dead who, by that time, were stacked up around the gatehouse. Although McConaughy made several trips to get her some help, none of the helpers would stay because of the terrible sights and smells.

Working from 6:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m. every day, with help from her father and her little boys, Elizabeth would bury over 100 soldiers after the battle.

In her own words, Elizabeth Thorn stated: “[We] kept on burying the soldiers until they had the National Cemetery ready, and in that time we buried one hundred five soldiers.

In front of this house there were fifteen dead horses and beside the Cemetery there were nineteen in that field.

So you may know it was only excitement that helped me to do all the work, with all that stench. And in three months after I had a dear little baby.”

GEORGE AND HETTIE SHRIVER

GEORGE WASHINGTON SHRIVER was 23 when he paid $290 for a lot on south Baltimore Hill in Gettysburg in the spring of 1860. He planned to build a new home for his family there. He and his wife HETTIE had two children: five-year-old Sadie and three-year-old Molly.

THE SHRIVERS were barely settled in their new home when the Civil War broke out in April of 1861. When President Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to help in the war effort, GEORGE enlisted in the PA Cavalry.

When the Battle of Gettysburg began early in the morning on July 1, 1863, HETTIE could hear the roar of the cannons from the west side of town. As the noise grew louder, she decided to leave for her parents’ farm about three miles south of town. She asked her neighbors, the Pierces, to allow their daughter Tillie to accompany her and her little girls.

HETTIE could not know they were jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Her parents' farm, the Jacob Weikert Farm sat between Big Round Top and Little Round Top-where some of the worst fighting of the Battle of Gettysburg took place. Over the next three days, the noise of the battle was so loud that they had to shout to hear each other inside the Weikert house. The house shook from the cannons firing all around them. When the fighting stopped there were wounded and dying men everywhere. HETTIE and Tillie knew they had to stay and help.

On July 7, HETTIE and her daughters returned home. As they approached town, they realized that in seven days their whole world had turned upside down. Fences were broken, buildings were gone, and many others stood in ruins. HETTIE found that Confederate soldiers had occupied her home while she was gone.

HETTIE’S neighbor, butcher James Pierce, told her that he had seen Confederate soldiers set up a sharpshooters' nest in her garret (attic), and he that he had watched the soldiers knock several "port holes" through the brick wall on the south side of the house in effort to pick off Union soldiers. According to Pierce, at least two sharpshooters had been killed inside HETTIE'S home, and their bodies had been dragged away through her garden.

Five months after the Battle of Gettysburg, GEORGE SHRIVER was granted a four-day furlough. This gave him the opportunity to spend Christmas with HETTIE and his girls. Shriver was a changed man when he returned. He had been away from his family for almost two and a half years and saw things he could not even begin to describe. GEORGE reported back to duty on December 29, 1863. Two days later, New Year's Day, 1864, he was taken prisoner by the Confederates and sent to Andersonville Prison in Georgia, where he died.

Numerous bullet holes are visible on the south side of the SHRIVERS’ home---a silent reminder of the struggle between the Union soldiers at the base of Cemetery Hill and the Confederates sharpshooters who occupied the SHRIVERS’ home during the battle.

Confederate sharpshooters commandeered the SHRIVERS’ home during the battle to fire at Union troops on nearby Cemetery Hill through two holes which they knocked through the south-facing brick wall.

A CSI police detective, using a luminol-like chemical, confirmed the presence of mass quantities of blood in the area where it is known at least two soldiers died during the siege.

ALBERTUS MCCREARY

ALBERTUS MCCREARY, whose house stood on the corner of Baltimore and High streets, was a month shy of his fifteenth birthday when the soldiers came to Gettysburg. He later recalled:

“We did not dare to look out the windows on the Baltimore street side. Sharpshooters from Cemetery Hill were watching all the houses for Confederate sharpshooters and picking off everyone they saw, since from that distance, they could not distinguish citizen from soldier. Along the street from east to west was stretched a line of Confederate infantry in reserve. I remember how poorly clad they were. Most of them were ragged and dirty, and they had very little to eat. One day while I was having a talk with the soldiers, I heard cheering down the street. It seemed to be caused by the passing along High street, toward our house, of a small body of officers on horseback. As they drew near, the men along our pavement stood and cheered also. One of the men told me it was General Lee and his staff.”

“I had a good look at him as he passed. He looked very much the soldier, sitting very erect in the saddle with his short-cropped beard and his Confederate gray. The whole staff was a fine-looking set of men --- at least, they seemed so to my youthful eyes and it is needless to say that I gazed at them with keen curiosity. They rode up as far as a slight elevation in the street, stopped, took their glasses, and surveyed Cemetery Hill, where they could see the positions of their enemy. This was just before the Louisiana Tigers made their famous charge. What a racket they did make! It was an infantry charge and the sound was as of a million boys with sticks were beating on a board fence. It was not in volleys, but continuous.”

Being a typical Gettysburg boy, ALBERTUS enjoyed “playing soldier” in his Union soldier’s hat (kepi).

Believing that he was actually a member of the Union Army, Confederate soldiers almost took him prisoner, until his father pleaded for his release, claiming that he was “only a school boy.”

ALBERTUS was friends with Charles McCurdy, whose father, Robert, was President of the Gettysburg Railroad and Gates Fahnstock (both Robert and Gates were 10 years old). All three boys ran all over town witnessing the shelling, sniping, and fighting.

In another incident, ALBERTUS recalls: “It was about noon…the street was full of Union soldiers, running and pushing each other, sweaty and black from powder and dust. They called to us for water. We got great buckets of water and tin dippers, and supplied them as fast as we could from the porch at the side of the house off the main street….. While we were carrying water to the soldiers, a small drummer boy ran up the porch, and handing me his drum, said, “Keep this for me.” I took it, ran down the cellar steps and hid it under a pile of shavings. He looked to be about twelve years old…. We were so busy that we did not notice how close the fighting was until, about half a block away, we saw hand-to-hand conflicts…. We kept right on distributing water until an officer rode his horse up on the pavement…and said, “All you good people go down in your cellars or you will all be killed.”

THE GARLACH FAMILY

ANNA GARLACH was 18 years old and lived on Baltimore Street. During the three days of the battle, Anna took care of her baby brother, FRANK, and helped her mother, CATHERINE manage their house and the soldiers there. Her father, HENRY, was a cabinet-maker, whose shop was adjacent to their house.

HENRY was not at home during the battle, as he was observing the battle from the crest of Cemetery Hill the first day and was cut off from home for the remainder of the battle.

The Garlach’s cellar flooded during the battle, but but the family and neighbors (about 15 people in all) stayed there by sitting on stumps.

One of the town's best known stories features General Alexander Schimmelfennig hiding in the Garlach's woodshed in their back yard behind the Garlach's brick house.

As recounted in ANNA GARLACH'S memoirs, her mother, CATHERINE, fed Schimmelfennig food under the pretense of feeding pigs. Schimmelfennig briefly hid in a culvert on Baltimore Street, and then stayed for several days in a shed on the Garlach property, avoiding capture. After the battle, he rejoined the corps, much to the pleasure of the troops who thought he was dead.

GARLACH HOUSE

LOCATION OF WOODSHED

WESLEY CULP

WESLEY CULP was a native of Gettysburg and lived there until he was a teenager. He learned to hunt in the woods on Culp’s Hill, which was owned by his uncle, Henry Culp. As a teen, WESLEY took a job with C.W. Hoffman, a carriage and harness maker on Chambersburg Street in Gettysburg, making leather trappings for horses and wagons. In 1858, Hoffman moved his business to Virginia, and WESLEY moved there to continue working. Although Wesley made new friends in Shepherdstown, he still kept in contact with friends and family in Gettysburg.

In 1861, when the war broke out, WESLEY chose to join the Confederate Army and fight alongside his new friends and neighbors as a member of Company B, 2nd Virginia Infantry Regiment. The 2nd Virginia, part of the famous “Stonewall Brigade” led by General “Stonewall” Jackson, saw its first combat during the First Battle of Manassas.

WESLEY survived the battle and went on to participate in the Valley Campaign of 1862, the Peninsula Campaign, the Second Battle of Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Second Battle of Winchester and Gettysburg.

Sometime during the fighting on July 3, WESLEY CULP was struck and killed on or near his uncle’s farm at Culp’s Hill. Members of the 2nd Virginia Infantry Regiment buried Culp, the only casualty of Company B, and supposedly marked his grave. The only remains of Private Culp to be uncovered later, however, was a rifle stock with his name carved into it.

William Culp, WESLEY’S brother, served in the Union Army. He survived the war and left the service as an officer. The story goes that he considered his brother a traitor for fighting against Pennsylvania and never spoke of him again.

TILLIE PIERCE

TILLIE PIERCE was 15 years old and lived at 301 South Baltimore Street at the time of the battle. She was the daughter of James Pierce, a butcher, and she lived next door to the Shriver family. At the time of the battle, TILLIE was a student at the Young Ladies’ Seminary on the corner of Washington and High Streets.

During the first day’s fighting, her family moved her out of the town with Hettie Shriver to the Weikert farm (the farm of Hettie’s father), thinking she would be safer there. It turned out that she ended up right behind the Union lines on the second and third day. The farm where she stayed became a field hospital, and this young girl witnessed much suffering and death.

Care of wounded soldiers continued upon returning to the family home on Baltimore Street. Among those she nursed was Colonel William Colvill of the 1st Minnesota Infantry. Tillie later wrote about her experiences in an article, "What a Girl Heard and Saw at the Battle.”

JENNY WADE

MARY VIRGINIA “JENNY” WADE was the 20-year-old daughter of James and Mary Ann Wade. Jennie came from a poor family because her father, a tailor, was sent first to state prison (in 1850). Two years later, he was declared insane by his wife, and committed to the Alms House where he died. Mary Ann supported herself and her four children as a seamstress, and Georgia and Virginia took up their mother’s trade. By 1863, Georgia had married and lived in a brick house on Baltimore Street, along the northern slope of Cemetery Hill. Five days before the battle, she gave birth to a son, and Jennie and her mother had gone to Georgia’s home to care for her and the new baby. They were trapped there, just within Union lines. By not going into the cellar, they exposed themselves to errant sniper fire, and on the morning of July 3, Jenny fell victim to that danger.

JENNY WADE was killed instantly by a stray Confederate bullet that penetrated two wooden doors and struck her in the back as she mixed bread dough in the kitchen. Buried by Union soldiers in the yard of the home, she was later moved to Evergreen Cemetery where a monument and flag mark her final resting place.

Hers was the only civilian death at Gettysburg, made even more tragic when it was discovered that Jack Skelly, her childhood friend and betrothed, who was serving in the 87th Pennsylvania Infantry, had been mortally wounded at Winchester the week before.

DAVID WILLS

DAVID WILLS was a prominent Gettysburg attorney, who was appointed by the state of Pennsylvania to oversee the establishment and construction of the Soldiers' National Cemetery, a final resting place for the Union dead at Gettysburg.

WILLS arranged the dedication ceremony, inviting orator Edward Everett to speak and President Lincoln to attend.

President Lincoln accepted Wills’s invitation, and he spent the night before the ceremony at Wills‘s home on the square in Gettysburg.

DAVID MCCONAUGHY

DAVID MCCONAUGHY was the son of a minister and a lifelong resident of Gettysburg. He was a noted attorney and civic leader, as well as a part-time intelligence officer for the Union Army during the Civil War. Upon the June 1863 invasion of the village, McConaughy offered his services to the government and was assigned to the secret service. There is substantial confirmation that he supplied, and persuaded friends to supply, intelligence up to the time of the battle.

McConaughy was also a driving force behind the preservation of the Gettysburg battlefield for future generations. He established the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association, which purchased portions of the battlefield to preserve it as a memorial to the Union Army that fought the great battle.

GETTYSBURG ADDRESS

The citizens of Gettysburg gathered together on November 19, 1863 for the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery, four and a half months after Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg. In just over two minutes, President Lincoln delivered what would become what has come to be regarded as one of the greatest speeches in American history.

President Lincoln’s brief but unforgettable “Gettysburg Address” followed a two-hour speech by renowned orator, Edward Everett.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.