Category: Gettysburg

Gettysburg
Civil War Women, Gettysburg

George Spangler Farm

• Maggie

Site of a Union Field Hospital On July 1, 1863, the George Spangler farm buildings were seized – the main house, summer kitchen and Pennsylvania bank barn. Based on the size of the buildings on the property, the farm’s relatively protected position from enemy artillery fire, its supply of well water, the large and accessible farm fields and its promixity to Baltimore Pike, it was chosen as the site of the field hospital for the Union XI Corps with at least seven Federal surgeons. Image: The George Spangler Farm, circa 1890, shows the house, barn and small outbuildings such as the smokehouse and summer kitchen. It is the best surviving example of a farm used as a corps field hospital…

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Civil War Women, Gettysburg

Sallie Robbins Broadhead

• Maggie

Civil War Nurse and Teacher Image: Coming Rain June 30, 1863 Dale Gallon, Artist Brigadier General John Buford at McPherson’s Farm Buford and his brigade commanders, Devin and Gamble, discuss the impending battle. Sallie Robbins Broadhead, a teacher in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, lived on the western end of Chambersburg Street in the end unit of a row house called Warren’s Block with her husband Joseph and 4-year-old daughter Mary. Sallie, a thin, plain-looking young woman, kept a daily diary from mid-June to mid-July 1863, providing a graphic firsthand account of the ordeal endured that summer by the civilians of Gettysburg. Gettysburg’s residents, about 2400 in number, knew that Southern troops were not very far away. On June 21, Captain Robert Bell’s…

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African Americans, Civil War Women, Gettysburg

African Americans of Gettysburg

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Blacks in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania Margaret Palm was a colorful character in Gettysburg’s African American community during the mid-nineteenth century. She served as a conductor along the local branch of the Underground Railroad, earning the nickname Maggie Bluecoat for the blue circa-1812 military coat she wore while conducting fugitive slaves north. One evening, she was accosted by two strangers who bound her hands and tried to kidnap her into Maryland and slavery. Her screams attracted help and she escaped her assailants. Alexander Dobbin, a Presbyterian minister, arrived in the Marsh Creek valley and purchased a two-hundred-acre plot of land in the spring of 1774. Two years later, Dobbin established the beginnings of local black community when he returned with two slaves…

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Civil War Women, Gettysburg

Lydia Leister

• Maggie

Home Used as Union Headquarters at the Battle of Gettysburg On July 1, 1863, Federal troops surrounded the Leister farm – it was in the crook of the fishhook battle line along Cemetery Ridge. When General George Gordon Meade chose the Leister house (image left) as the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac, Lydia and her children sought shelter with relatives who lived on the Baltimore Pike. Lydia Leister was a widow who owned a modest farm along the Taneytown Road, ½ mile south of Gettysburg behind Cemetery Ridge. Lydia had purchased the property in 1861, and moved into the modest two-room house with her six children, the youngest, only three years old. The widow Leister made her living…

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Civil War Women, Gettysburg

Mary Long Sell Thompson

• Maggie

Widow of Gettysburg I find it quite interesting that the commanders-in-chief of the armies at Gettysburg, Confederate General Robert E. Lee and Union General George Gordon Meade, chose the homes of widows as their headquarters during the battle. Lee’s Headquarters House On July 1, 1863, General Robert E. Lee established his personal headquarters at a stone house on the Chambersburg Pike, just outside of town. The house was owned by Thaddeus Stevens, a Pennsylvania congressman and statesman. Lee’s staff chose that house not only because of this close proximity to the center of the Confederate line, but also because the house’s thick walls afforded the General some physical protection from artillery shells. Lee’s headquarters tents were set up in an…

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Civil War Women, Gettysburg

Mary McAllister

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The McAllister sisters, Mary and Martha, were daughters of Daniel and Mary McCullough McAllister. Daniel’s brother James was a farmer and miller, whose anti-slavery sentiments were known in the region. In fact, McAllister’s Mills, near the dam on Rock Creek, were stations on the Underground Railroad, where escaped slaves took refuge on their way to freedom. The home of John and Martha Scott and Martha’s sister Mary McAllister on Chambersburg Street, directly across from the Lutheran Church. Mary volunteered as a nurse at the church, which was being used as a hospital. At the time of the Battle of Gettysburg, the McAllister sisters lived in the store at 41 Chambersburg Street that was run by Martha’s husband, John Scott. On…

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Civil War Women, Gettysburg

Josephine Miller Slyder

• Maggie

Nurse at the Battle of Gettysburg Erected in 1886, this monument to the First Massachusetts Infantry Regiment is south of Gettysburg on the Emmitsburg Road, where the regiment fought during the battle. It depicts a skirmisher stepping over a rail fence with Seminary Ridge in the background. At that time the Peter Rogers house stood just to the south of this monument. The Battle of Gettysburg resulted in as many as 40,000 deaths, laid waste to the town’s structures, and prompted many of its civilian population of 2,400 to hide in cellars, holes and ditches. Fortunately, several Gettysburg residents remained in the fray to feed the hungry soldiers soon to be engaged in battle and to care for those who…

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Civil War Women, Gettysburg

Elizabeth Thorn

• Maggie

Caretaker of Gettysburg’s Evergreen Cemetery At the time of the Battle of Gettysburg, Elizabeth Thorn was caretaker of Evergreen Cemetery, a job normally performed by her husband Peter but he was away serving in the Union Army. Her elderly parents and her three small sons were living with her in the cemetery gatehouse, and she was six months pregnant. The cemetery grounds were littered with dead soldiers and horses, and it was her responsibility to bury them. Image: Elizabeth Thorn Monument This 7-foot bronze statue created by sculptor Ron Tunison of Cairo, New York, depicts a weary Elizabeth Thorn, leaning on a shovel as she rests from her work. The memorial was dedicated in November 2002 and honors the contributions…

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Civil War Nurses, Civil War Women, Gettysburg

Carrie Shead

• Maggie

For many years during the mid-nineteenth century Carrie Shead ran a school for young ladies in the family home on the Chambersburg Pike, just west of Gettysburg in southern central Pennsylvania. On the morning of July 1, 1863, Carrie sent the students home at the first sound of gunfire. That afternoon, the Battle of Gettysburg engulfed her home, as Union forces began to fall back from Seminary Ridge. Colonel Charles Wheelock of the 97th New York Infantry ran into the Shead house, closely followed by several Confederate soldiers intent on taking him prisoner. He fled down to the cellar, but the Rebels followed him. Carrie went, too, pleading for a stop to further bloodshed. When the Confederates called for his…

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Civil War Women, Gettysburg

Sallie Myers

• Maggie

Civil War Nurse at Gettysburg Elizabeth Salome ‘Sallie’ Myers was born at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on June 24, 1842, the daughter of Peter and Mary Myers. Her father was a Justice of the Peace, and they were among the wealthier families in town. By 1863 Gettysburg was a thriving little community with 2,400 inhabitants, 190 of them African Americans. At the age of sixteen Sallie became a school teacher. In 1863 she was employed by the Gettysburg public school system as an assistant to the principal, and was still living with her family on West High Street. Sallie was in her fourth week of summer vacation from her teaching job, and had recently celebrated her 21st birthday when fighting broke out…

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