An Evening at Evergreen Cemetery

good evening everybody thank you for joining us my name is andrew dalton i'm the director of the adams county historical society here in gettysburg it's great to have i think over 200 people already on this video please uh let us know where you're joining from we'd love to hear from you um and we're excited to be actually on uh in a very historic setting tonight whoop we gotta turn that down sorry we've never done this before so bear with us and there is a little bit of wind this evening um so we'll try to keep the the camera close to uh the speaker and uh if you have any trouble hearing though please let us know but thanks for joining the adams county historical society preserves millions of historic items in gettysburg and that pertain to all eras of our local history we tell the stories of the citizens of the community and their ordeal during events like the battle of gettysburg so tonight we're actually going to be going to some of the the final resting places of some of the more famous residents here in adams county and we have historian tim smith with us who's going to be talking about their stories their legacies and uh more broadly the history of evergreen cemetery so i want to give a shout out to maria lynn our collections manager behind the camera tonight and again we'll try to watch the comments so if you do have questions throughout the broadcast please let us know we'll be sure to to direct them to tim and we may even stop at some of your ancestors graves if you you have ancestors buried here and we can easily um stop and and see their grave we may be able to do that i also want to give a quick shout out to the dobbin house tavern which has sponsored all of our annual programs this year and then finally i hope you'll continue to support the adams county historical society's capital campaign to build a new museum and a new headquarters for our incredible collection um and uh we will make sure that there's a link posted in the comments to enable you to visit our website and donate but without any further ado i think i will turn it over to my good friend our historian tim smith who's also the president of the evergreen cemetery association so tim is going to walk us through the cemetery this evening thanks so tonight we're going to be talking a little bit about evergreen cemetery and some of the people buried here uh i'm not going to get into extreme detail on the history of the cemetery and i'm not going to show all the graves of the people i would like to talk about so if you have an interest in evergreen we recommend that you read the book beyond the gate house by the superintendent of the cemetery brian kennel and this is available on the adams county historical society website in our bookstore so you might think about that it has lots of great stories and a good general history now for those of you who are unfamiliar with the area we are on cemetery hill just south of the town of gettysburg pennsylvania and of course cemetery hill is where the northern army rallied on the evening of the first day of the fighting and on the second and third day of the fighting cemetery hill was the anchor of the union battle line and the union line basically stretched from culp sill which is out behind me around the cemetery here hill and down to a little on big round top and on top of cemetery hill you get a good view of the area that surrounds it there were abs actually troops positioned in the cemetery during the fighting tombstones were damaged during the battle uh i should mention that the evergreen cemetery was established in 1854 and the first burials were in november of that year so it was about nine years old at the time of the battle of gettysburg and today there are some 15 000 people buried in evergreen cemetery at the time of the battle there were about 500 we have about 400 burial permits uh and then of course there were people that had been moved in here and uh the burial premise didn't start right away i think not until 1856. so let's say there were about 500 people buried in the cemetery at the time of the battle um of course the evergreen cemetery gate house is uh was built in 1855 a year after the cemetery was established and the first caretaker was peter thorne and in 1863 peter thorne joined i think they're coming here peter thorne joined the union army and uh he was not here at the time of the battle and his wife elizabeth was actually the caretaker of the cemetery and following the battle uh she her father and uh a couple helpers he managed to get for a short time buried over 90 soldiers in the cemetery and of course she was pregnant at the time so um quite an ordeal she went through now one there's a couple stories that are associated with the cemetery that are pretty well known and i'd say one of the more famous stories that got a lot of attention in the years after the civil war um uh it was actually the earliest mention i could find of it i uh in a written source is in 1866 it's told in the photographic um scrapbook of alexander gardner and basically the story goes like this the original cemetery was a very handsome enclosure and contained many elegant monuments very few of which were injured notwithstanding the terrible nature of the conflict the shrubbery was badly broken and the fences swept away but at the conclusion of the fight there still remained as if in mockery the notice all persons found using firearms and these grounds will be prosecuted with the utmost rigor of the law the shattered trees and crushed flowers have all been replaced by others whose beauty and fragrance we may confidently hope shall never be again blasted by war colonel edward solomon of the 82nd illinois um also gave a colorful version of this story in a speech he gave in 1912. he mentioned that while he was in the cemetery on july 2nd he called general oliver otis howard's attention to that same sign driving riding and shooting on these grounds strictly prohibited any persons violating the ordinance will be punished by fine and imprisonment i told the general that he was surely getting into trouble after the battle for violating this order while the general was reading it a shell struck the board and knocked it into a thousand pieces well said to general the ordinance is rescinded i think the shooting can go on always like in the middle of a battle where men are dying and shells are flying we have time for a little bit of humor i i think that's a that's a great story now we don't really have any evidence that such a sign existed but this story is in many books and it's one of the more popular stories associated with our cemetery now um now we're going to walk through the cemetery and i'm going to tell you a little bit about some of the people buried here um the cemetery the cemetery was laid out uh shortly after it was established and one thing's interesting in our cemetery is that family plots were sold it's the first non-denominational cemetery in the area meaning it's not associated with one particular church and so the families in the town purchase plots in the cemetery in various locations so where a cemetery you know you might have like plots at the beginning of the oldest stones in the beginning and then they get more recent as uh you know go back through the cemetery or a cemetery since it had family plots and the families chose their plots all across the top of the hill some of the oldest stones are in the back and there's some old stones in the front and also after the cemetery was established other people were removed from cemeteries and other places and their bodies were placed in the family plots alongside the people that died after the cemetery was established so we're going to see that we have a lot of older stones and that brings us to our first resident i want to talk about here and that is james gettis the founder of our town and you might notice that james gaddis died in march of 1815. his wife died a few days later and i believe his mother also died about the same time apparently a fever was going through the town uh and it's mentioned uh in one of their um death notices uh james gaddis was originally buried in the upper marsh creek presbyterian cemetery which still exists out on belmont road near the momentsburg road and in 1865 his son who had moved to tennessee came back to gettysburg and moved his father and mother's remains his brother's remains um kind of uh one of his cousins who kind of was his adopted sister it was moved into the cemetery so the ghetto family was moved here later and this large memorial was placed on their grave one of the more interesting stories associated with this is there's a slab in front of the stone and originally there was a cast iron greyhound dog at this site but the cast iron dog was stolen from our cemetery many years ago and um you can see where it used to be here on the slab uh a local story told by early tour guides um was that james gettis was a great collector of dogs and when the borough was incorporated in 1806 uh one of the first rules they passed was attacks on dogs and james getting who would own the town for many years and wasn't really used to taking orders from a town council was unhappy and he had a collar made for his dogs and the caller said hi i am james gettys dog whose dog are you and of course the story is that this cast iron greyhound dog had that collar on but of course we don't have a close-up or a photograph it to con of it to confirm that i personally like to point out the grave back there and it's robert dennis this is um uh james getting his son who died i believe in 1827. we can walk back if you like and uh it says on it there's a poem on the grave and the poem says and you don't have to see it particularly remember me as you pass by as you are now so once was i as i am now so shalt thou be prepare for death and follow me there's a second verse but i think you get the gist of it what's interesting about that is this is not unique this poem it appears in cemeteries all over the northeastern united states um it appears apparently in cemeteries in europe i read an article about it in reader's digest about how prevalent this inscription by an unknown poet is on stones and i think i have seen it like 10 times in different stones in different adams county cemeteries and usually when we do a cemetery tour i find a stone with that inscription according to the article in reader's digest when you see that inscription on a stone you are supposed supposed to repeat back to it to follow you i am not content until i find out which way you went what is the name of james getty's dog cole do we know we do not know the name of james get us a dog good let's walk over here when i walk through the cemetery i can't help but notice all the local adams county names like shriver or spangler or bushmen or wykert let's walk over here to the white house when we did our program on jenny wade last week we got a lot of attention and questions about the trinity reformed cemetery i mentioned that is one of the cemeteries that used to be in downtown gettysburg but after they opened evergreen you know they slowly removed the stones and the bodies out of those other cemeteries into evergreen and in 1927 whichever stones were left there was a mass removal to the cemetery uh from trinity and these three stones here in the weincard plot were originally in trinity reformed church cemetery and look at this one john weikert who died i believe in 1839 and it says stop passengers as you pass by as i am as you are now so once was i as i am now so you may be prepare for death and follow me just to show you that there's another uh stone like that just here not far from the original let's walk back here well you're walking just want to thank the american battlefield trust our good friends for sharing the feed tonight and happy to have all of you with us so the cemetery had its grand opening on november 7th 1854 and this is a copy obviously of the um program for the opening of the cemetery the dedication ceremonies and this is in the collections of the adams county historical society so november 7th and this is mary beitler who died on october 29th 1854 wife of daniel beitler aged 75 her funeral was on november 1st and this is the first person buried in evergreen cemetery now having said that there's a lot of stones in here that uh pre-date 1854. uh there are a few stones from the 1760s in the cemetery so there are stones from people that were buried at other locations and they were later moved into the cemetery into the family plots after the cemetery was established also i just want to show this photograph from 1867 and you can see that many of the family plots had fences around them or shrubbery around them the cemetery had an altogether different appearance at the time than it does now i think in 1875 they decided that no longer would they allow fences to be placed around plots and slowly over the years from that point they removed the fences and now you can see that the family pots are all just kind of connected together but they still you know they're still laid out in these plots so let's walk in this direction we're gonna keep you moving and like i said as you walk through the cemetery you can't help but notice um lots of familiar names from our county we just passed uh some of the bushmans in spanglish paula ball i want to get away from this please feel free to give us your questions we're watching carefully so if you have any questions just put them in the comments and we'll make sure that uh tim gets him of course being a licensed battlefield guide i like to point out the graves of battlefield tour guides and here is the grave of luther minig who was 14 years old at the time of the battle his brother was henry minig the captain of company k first pennsylvania reserves and he was a a boy at the time who was in his basement during the fighting on west middle street and later he became a prominent tour guide and he wrote uh early tour book which is you know you can buy this around town in the flea markets and the adams county historical side he must have like 10 copies of it of course he's very proud and um he's one of the more prominent tour guides and he has his photograph on the earth you know engraving here on the front of his book let's walk up in this direction now john herbst who uh had a farm on the first day's battlefield and of course he was married twice i don't know a lot of people realize his first wife suzanne died in september 1863 of sort of disease from the battle can you imagine the conditions after the fighting and how horrible it was and it was a lot of uh bad water in the wells and and she got sick and died now also i wanted to mention sarah j hoffman or sadie hoffman and she uh left an account of the battle you can see she lived until 1938 and her account she's the one that describes that every person in town was issued a bottle of peppermint oil with a which they hung on a chain around their neck and they had a rag and they would dump peppermint oil on the rag and hold it over their face to dead in their sense of smell so as you walk through here not only do we have local adams county residents but you know since at the historical society we deal with the battle and the farmers who lived on the fields around the town most of the farmers are buried in this area that are prominent from the battle of gettysburg and now of course we're going to walk up to a section in our cemetery where something happened that really made this place famous maybe more than the battle let's walk on tim are there any confederate soldiers buried in this cemetery there are at least two confederate soldiers known to being buried in the cemetery and they are in the soldiers section and they were moved into the cemetery after the civil war from a hospital site south of the town and they were placed in the soldier section it's interesting that after they were buried here local citizens came to a cemetery board meeting and demanded that the soldiers be removed and so the two soldiers were buried in an undisclosed location within the cemetery grounds and today we argue about where that might be now there are two other confederate soldiers all the time ahead buried here also and of course that's post-war well theoretically one of them is a guy um who uh miles wilson who was in the um it was in scales brigade and after the first days fighting he went to a local farm and he hid out at that farm he went awol from his unit and he just stayed in gettysburg after the battle and then of course theoretically you know wesley culp may be buried here that's what people say but we don't know that for sure okay let's go up here tim just off the top of your head if we're walking by we've got people asking to see the mcconaughey's the tro souls and uh alan frazier which i'm sure you're probably already planning to stop at tim does know every family plot in the cemetery by heart right tim oh sure sure mcconaughey might be a little hard to get to oh here just flash down here jay luvas so not only do we have um you know older battlefield guides but he is a a newer historian and wrote a tour book of the battlefield for the war college that some of our tour guides are very familiar with let's go through here tim who is the most famous citizen buried in evergreen cemetery that's probably the most famous person buried in evergreen cemetery without a doubt is mary ann moore because she's a poet and she's the only person buried in our cemetery with their own postage stamp there you go sure how can you argue about that eddie plank a close second she doesn't get her of course i would say jenny wade john burns or eddie plant here is the grave of israel yount at the time of the civil war israel yount owned the washington house hotel which is the current site of the lincoln diner on carlisle street and after the battle his hotel was used as a hospital here's an advertisement of the hotel with the earliest photograph we have that gives an idea of the appearance of the hotel but it was right around this site where the platform was positioned during abraham lincoln's gettysburg address so the dedication of the soldiers national cemetery obviously um the cemetery is right here the platform is pretty long and pretty wide so it went across through this area and of course you know we argue about the exact site of the platform but we're right in the area of the platform and lincoln stood on the platform and spoke to a crowd of spectators four months after the battle that stood out in that direction and um uh do you have the no oh okay i'm sorry we're going to at the adams county historical side you might know that we have an actual program from the ceremonies of lincoln's gettysburg address the dedication of the soldiers national cemetery but uh let's walk over here now does tim have a plot waiting for him at evergreen i do have a plot in evergreen cemetery you can't be on the board of evergreen cemetery if you don't have a plot in the cemetery i wanted to walk over here for a summer i'm walking in circles for you right here this wasn't one that i planned to show but here we are mary thompson the widow whose house was used by robert e lee as his headquarters during the battle and let's walk over here you'll notice jenny wade in the distance i'm sure tim has a a plan to visit jenny i do not really we visited jenny wade last week in our program that's why i wasn't thinking about it here is solomon powers who was born in um new hampshire he was a stone cutter uh he lived on high street at the time of the battle and he lived there with his wife and six daughters and his daughters cared for wounded soldiers after the battle they went outside their house they gathered up um uh wounded soldiers and nursed them back to health and it was the women of gettysburg who nursed the wounded soldiers who baked bread for the hungry soldiers who buried the dead after the fighting and elizabeth thorne statue that's erected in this cemetery is an honor not just of her but all the women of gettysburg who sacrificed during this critical time in our country's history but solomon powers um you know the adams county historical society has this incredible photograph of him um uh there was a boy living with solomon powers at the time of the battle his name was alan frazier and you might notice there's a brand new stone for alan frazier and i should mention that this stone was uh placed here uh by the uh gettysburg civil war round table so we have to have a shout out for the round table and they're good work he did not have a stone but we do have a burial permit for him and he is buried in this plot according to the gettysburg compiler of november 23rd 1863 terrible accident mr russell briggs of philadelphia who came here to remove the remains of his son killed into battle and at the same time witnessed the ceremonies of thursday the gettysburg address met with a terrible accident on friday november 20th at the residence of mr solomon powers it seems that he had picked up a shell on the battlefield undertook to unload it he had the cap taken out and was striking the shell upon a stone to loosen the powder and thus attract the balls when the missile exploded with a loud report and so horribly mangled his hands as to require immediate amputation of both while the shell bursted alan frazier an interesting lad of 14 son of t l frazier deceased but living with mr powers was standing near mr briggs when it exploded and a fragment striking him in the abdomen cut him nearly in two causing his death in a few minutes his remains were interred on saturday in evergreen cemetery another warning and one of the saddest that the dangerous business of shells opening has yet afforded may it be the last and here's the burial permit for alan frazier and you might notice that it says disease killed by the explosion of a shell and it gives his location as being at this site so that's how we knew where to put the stone now i should mention that the adams county historical society has an original copy of the post-war burial permits for evergreen cemetery and i hope that this particular thing will be on display when we get our new uh museum gallery design but it's fascinating let's continue on oh what's on this one tim how many uh citizens of the town were injured or killed by unexploded ordnance like alan frazier i would say it depends how you count because some of the people who were injured by unexploded lawrence after the battle are not um living in the town like there's a child in fairfield and there's a guy from york that's injured but i would say that i can think off the top of my head at least six or eight and uh you know it was a serious issue after the battle loaded weapons lying around on the battlefield shells and we're going to talk about another explosion coming up here soon let's walk this way and thank you to timothy york who says this is the best achs presentation to date timothy york might be a friend of mine so here is the grave of frederick huber and this is kind of sad is the son of a doctor who lived on chambersburg street at the time of the battle and he was actually in philadelphia to outbreak the war and he joined the 23rd pennsylvania infantry the khalas zouaves and at the battle of fair oaks in 1862 um frederick huber was killed and his remains were brought back to gettysburg he was buried in his grave and during the battle of gettysburg an artillery shell hit his stone and damaged his stone and his father made sure the stone was never repaired so it's one of the you know we we argue about exactly how many you know three or four stones in our cemetery that absolutely still show battle damage from the fighting in july 1863. obviously many of those things that were damaged were replaced afterwards i said this way tim are there any other famous soldiers buried in the cemetery off the top of your head i guess famous famous soldiers well you know we have a soldier from the battle of shiloh a guy who mortally wounded the battle shiloh buried here we got a guy up there that died in a hospital at um nashville tennessee and of course we have uh jenny way's boyfriend jack scaley buried just a short distance over there so we have local adams county soldiers that are buried here um so i would say yes but again it depends on how you look at it this guy here john mcfarland in 1833 built a house and today we call the farnsworth house and um right over here i just wanted to point out we're going this way anyway um here's the troxel there you go so i think they wanted truss trucel they want choice okay this is the toxin okay okay you can't see this one very well but this is john hauck he owned devil's den at the time of the battle john hauck tim showed a picture earlier of solomon powers and we have hundreds maybe even over a thousand images of the people of gettysburg and adams county many of which were taken at the time of the civil war of my favorite people john e pitzer who lived at um i'm thinking the address today is uh 143 chambersburg street but he lived on the pitzer farm at the time of the battle behind um the north carolina monument so if you go on confederate avenue to the north carolina mike there's a big old farm back here the pitzer farm and john pitcher served as a veteran in civil war i believe off the top my head he was in 165th pennsylvania infantry but um after the war he was another of those who served as tour guides and this check out this awesome picture of john pitzer uh he bought if i wasn't licensed but battlefield tour guide and um here is an advertisement for the pitzer house like i say today i'm pretty sure it's 143 chambersburg street but boarding and lodging the only temperance house look they even have warm and cold baths and here of course teams and guides to all the principal points of interest on the battlefield including a good substantial dinner a dollar 25 for a whole day's tour with a dinner wow i think that's a good deal but i just i mean i just love that photograph of john pitcher let's go this way someone's pointing out that the cemetery is beautifully maintained and kudos to brian kennel we should thank brian our superintendent is just awesome i don't know if i know there's very few people i know that are so good at their job and are a command of every detail of their job and you know i challenge you to find a better well-maintained cemetery than this he does an awesome job and uh uh of course his father was the superintendent of this cemetery prior to him being superintendent and so he learned from his father and he's been here for many many years and like the thorns he still lives in the gatehouse yeah just like the thornton family did at the time of the battle he lives in the gatehouse now this is the sheeds family plot and there are a number of seeds families in gettysburg but of course the one that gets the most attention is the family of elias sheaves and if we walk right over here you'll see here's elias sees and elias seeds has four sons and three daughters of course the most famous of which is back there carrie sheeds kerry sheaves uh ran a private uh girls school out of her father's house um all four of carrie's brothers served in the civil war and all four of her brothers died as a result of their service james um died in the hospital at city point in 1864 elias was killed in the battle of monocacy and it says that right on the stone um david uh he suffered horribly during the war and died a few years afterwards in 1874 and um uh robert tees back there died after the war but of his wounds received at white oak swamp their sister louisa um died in 1866 i believe and she it um it might be 65 it's kind of hard to read i think it's 65. she died according to the family of a chloroform overdose we've never been able to prove that but she was nursing soldiers in washington dc and kerry and elizabeth because of their family sacrifice were actually given jobs in the treasury department and the war department in washington dc they had a niece there was a daughter i believe of um robert mary and she died in 1944 none of the girls married and so basically this large family ended because of the tragedy the american civil war and you might see that they have very patriotic stones and it has that latin inscription on the base of the stone um i and believe me i don't know much latin something like uh it translates something like there's no sweeter death than for one's country something like that and uh maria who's behind the camera she was instrumental in getting the historical society a donation just about a month ago and that donation included the only known photograph of carrie sheeds which a lot of gettysburg aficionados were very very excited about and so we posted it and this is her uh from a washington dc studio about a year or two prior to her death and off the top my head 1884 it's 1884 she dies so um along with that we also received some other photographs i'm going to talk about in a moment but let's walk over here this is the daniel culp family plot and you know i know it's nice that at some point they took all the old you know uh stones away and they put these nice new stones here at this spot we have a few photographs of i don't know at the time ahead exactly when this occurred but they replaced all the stones i wonder what they did with the original stones i tend to like the old hard to read beat up stones not the new replacement stones but one of uh daniel kolp sons is james culp who died in his 17th year and uh here's the burial permit for james m calp and you might see 16 years 10 months 22 days in the 17th year disease killed by the explosion of a shell on september 9th 1863 and according to the article in the newspaper it was just on the other side of the cemetery at the base of east cemetery hill where james m kulp was trying to get the uh fuse out of an explosive shell so he could bang it against a rock and get the fuse the get the powder out the shell exploded and he was killed and of course he's buried here so there we point out two people that we know of in our cemetery that were killed accidentally after the battle because of explosive shell and uh let's walk over here we have a ton of information about the people buried here in front of us and if we go to the danucorp family uh the colt family back there the sheeds family the colt family over here um i was telling uh andrew earlier i think i can come up with in this area photographs for more than half of these people probably about 20 photographs for this small plot so let's let's look right right here here is jeremiah kolp who lived on york street at the time of the battle and we also this is uh from a daguerreotype in uh our collection at the adams county historical society we also have a daguerreotype of his wife and photographs of many of his children and um i wanted to point out this one in particular andrew this is i don't know if you can read it jay need culp and jeremiah mead culp was born on july 4th 1863 and he died in august of 1863 so that's why you don't hear much about him but undoubtedly he is one of the battle babies let's walk back here for a moment and we have you know all these photographs the adams county historical society we're excited to be displaying those at our new building that we're working on right now we're actually going to have a wall of faces of all the citizens of the town who witnessed these events in 1863 and we have photographs that date back as tim said to glass plate images the daguerreotypes and ambro types we also have tin types and cdvs or carts divisits from the civil war period so all these images collectively uh we're excited to show those so that you can actually look right into the eyes of the people who who saw all these incredible events so here is john jefferson myers and he's buried right here and he was a member of the 87th pennsylvania i believe um and he actually left the unit uh uh he had uh some illness and so at the time of the battle he was living on middle street in gettysburg in the spring of 1863. jay jefferson myers sally meyer's brother married wesley culp's sister and here is in occult wesley's sister of course wesley kopp being the guy though who was raised in gettysburg then moved to virginia prior to the outbreak of the war joined the second virginia infantry assist of the stonewall brigade returned to gettysburg as part of the confederate army and was killed in the fighting somewhere east of town probably on july 2nd 1863 not far from the hill named after his great grandfather probably killed on brinker hall fridge though this is his sister inna culp myers and there she is right there and uh it was her house on uh west middle street that wesley called visited on the evening of july first and told her that she had a message for mrs skelly because her son um johnston haste you know jack skelly johnston hastings kelly jr was wounded at the battle winchester and of course some say that she had uh partly a message for jenny wade i i don't know if i believe that but here are wesley culps and inoculp's parents um here is margaret culp and she died in 1856 and then after that wesley moved to virginia his father osiris culp died in 1861 and uh here's an image of him and his stone was struck by an artillery shell during the fighting and at some point a marker was placed on the stone to indicate that fact so this is actually the grave of wesley kopp's father and uh in that collection we mentioned that we received with the kerry sheets photograph it came from a culp family member we have this image that we believe is ossias kulp and margaret sutherland i believe her maiden name is called so there we believe were wessie kolp's parents and we believe this to be a daguerreotype of a younger sister of wesley culp that died and we believe this is one of those mortuary images that were recorded early on a daguerreotype fascinating stuff let's walk back here this is william kolp this is wesley and anna's brother and he is buried right here sometimes lost in the story of jenny wade is the fact that william kolp was a member of company f 87th pennsylvania infantry and at the battle of winchester on june 15 1863 william kulp and his brother wesley fought against each other as a matter of fact the two unit the two units met each other on the field of battle and fired into each other wesley survived the battle of course jack skelly was mortally wounded and died into fighting but brother against brother and also part of that group of photographs we were just discussing we received images of salome sheeds culp the wife of william kopp and this is about an 1862 photograph with one of her children and her two sons on either side and this is lauren kopp who is buried who's buried right there there's lauren call and also if we walk right out here for a moment here is one of my favorite all-time gettysburg names will burtis kulp and you can see that his nickname is birdie so will burtis and here in this image the little child anna is buried is buried here and you can see she dies on september 12 1863 one other grave we want to point out over here is the grave of george cult he died in 1874 he was 74 years old george clook lived out on the fairfield road west of gettysburg and at the adams county historical society we actually have this incredible handwritten note in pencil kind of scribbled onto a piece of paper and left in the house of george culp by the confederates and says mr culp your house was torn up pretty bad but we'll do it a good deal more next summer if you don't quit burning up our houses and turning our women and children out of doors and at the end it says when this uc remember the ninth regiment of alabama volunteers so george cole had his house ransacked by the confederates probably on the night of july 1st or on july 2nd by this kind of roving band of alabama soldiers that was going around behind the confederate lines it's a great story a wonderful artifact we're going to have in our new museum very good i am so excited about that that note and back here i just wanted to point out for uh those of you of course who are interested in the story of the adams county historical society you might notice that we have a huge amount of items from sally myers stewart who nursed the soldiers after the battle in her home in the roman catholic church on west high street and then later at camp letterman and we have just a wonderful collection of letters we have her passes that she used to get out to the hospital and we have stuff associated with the care of the wounded including photographs of some of the people that she had cared for and including uh two guys that died under her care and her son was henry stork and henry stewart who's buried right back there of course is uh more famous for being the number one employee of the adams county historical society during our tenure at the courthouse and every day at work i run across something that henry stewart put together at our society a finding guide or something that helps me locate information on local citizens we should note our our previous director charles glatfelter who was director for 40 years actually knew henry stewart when he was a young boy in gettysburg so it's amazing you know that our good friend charlie glatfeld who passed away a few years ago knew the son of sally myers and and uh you know the civil war nurse so in this section we just walked around we didn't cover much ground right here but you can see that we have a large amount of information and we didn't even get into all the different stories we have of the people that are buried here but let's walk over in this direction sorry about that got some people in the cemetery this evening they're wonderful evening to be out and looking at bold headstones tim do you know what year the kennels took over as superintendents of the cemetery someone's asking approximately a great question it's i'm going to say i i i i don't remember at the time ahead but it's in the 1970s art kennel was uh the caretaker of the gettysburg country club and i'm pretty sure he took the job in the 70s because uh brian kennel who's exactly the same age as me i lived down the bottom of the hill for a time and i remember that uh when he graduated from high school he went to work here and that would have been in 1981 so the 70s so let's go this way great just a reminder any other questions just feel free to put them in the comments we'll make sure we we answer them as best we can the road system in the cemetery tim is that something that's been around for quite some time now the road system is the same system that we had originally but there were actually paths between the roads from the different sections so you'll see as we go along i don't have a good example around me oh over there's one but there are paths within the historic plots so that you actually could walk down a road then get onto a side trail without entering a family plot and this was important because remember there were fences around each family plot and i should point out and let's just back up a little bit since somebody asked a question um here is one of the roads the paths this is the roads are named on our cemetery map but this is one of the paths between lots we have recently cemeteries need to stay in business and they need to be current and vibrant people now have the opportunity to buy a lot in what used to be one of the paths so look over here and you may notice that down here in this path is a grave of jim getty who played abraham lincoln in our town functions for years and years and years of course he has no relation to the local gettys family he was from illinois but i'm sure many of you knew jim getty another question about how the superintendents are hired is that a board decision you know what the cemetery is basically run the same today as it was run at its inception in the 1850s and of course the board of directors gets together and they hire the superintendent but i wouldn't know anything about that because brian and his father have been the superintendent of the cemetery for so many years i don't even know how that would work okay let's go on one of the earlier question was are there any witness trees in evergreen cemetery it's hard to um you know i don't think there are any witness trees in evergreen cemetery we had large trees the cemetery is very conscious of the fact that if a tree falls it takes out a large amount of stones so if a tree uh gets to the age where it has some issues the tree's removed and replaced by another so we don't have but of course right over there um we're not too far from it and the national cemetery is a honey locust along the fence which is a witness trip wonderful you can also see the speaker's rostrum in the national cemetery over to our right many many united states presidents and dignitaries and famous americans have spoken from from that platform and of course that's where the annual celebration is to commemorate the gettysburg address anniversary which i'm sure many of you have attended and um you know we could go on and on and on of course it's going to get dark soon so i thought we'd end at the graves of elizabeth and peter thorne peter thorne being a veteran of the civil war was in company b 138 pennsylvania volunteers and at the time of the battle he was in harpers ferry with the rest of his unit and elizabeth thorne was a caretaker of the cemetery and of course elizabeth thorne uh leaves us an excellent account of the battle and for this if you're interested in it you can find it on the internet i'm sure but you can always purchase brian kendall's book on evergreen cemetery or there's a book on the story of elizabeth thorne by one of the adams county volunteers uh sue boardman who's actually um uh chairman of the are not a chairman but she's on the board of of the adams county historical society so sue's book is really good also so you might want to check that out but um she talks about burying the dead in her account after the battle and she says well you may know that my husband won his army my husband was in the army my father was an aged man yet for all the foul air we started uh digging graves i struck off the graves while my father finished one i had another one started this lasted for days until the boy sent word if i couldn't get help at all i should telegraph to some friends to come and help me two came but only stayed for two days they got deathly sick and left the other stayed five days he went away very sick and i had to pay their affair here and very good wages for their work by the time by that time we had 40 graves dug and then father and i had to dig on harder again they kept on burying the soldiers until the sold the national cemetery was ready and in that time we had buried 105 soldiers uh other accounts suggested was 91 but i think when you get up to that many soldiers you're probably not really thinking about counting that well um she also says that uh in front of the house were 15 dead horses and beside the cemetery there were 19 in that field so you may know that it was the it was only excitement it helped me do all the work with all that stage and in three months after i had a dear little baby but it was not very strong the child was named rosa meade thorne and of course middle name was named just like jeremiah mead culp named after the union army commander gettysburg and sure enough if you visit the cemetery rosa meade thorne died i believe at the age of 14 and i don't know if you can read it rosa meade right there so um now there's lots of other people in the cemetery we could have pointed out and lots of places we could have gone to the sun is getting ready to set so it's time to end our tour and i'll let andrew finish it here thanks tim thank you i can't believe there's 450 people almost watching this program tonight which is incredible we really appreciate your support you know the adams county historical society is always in need of having new members and new supporters and new donors to help us preserve all this history we are all about the stories that you heard tonight the people who lived here what their experiences were like now they're they're incredible memories of things like the battle of gettysburg of the gettysburg address and you know of all areas of history of course the eisenhower's lived here later and before the civil war we have a rich history as well so we are building a new facility we need your help if you enjoyed the program tonight i hope you'll like our page and also in the comments we just posted a link to our website where you can make a donation we really support it um and we really appreciate your support and uh i hope you'll continue to watch our videos one last question was where uh can you watch the other videos we've done we do have a youtube channel and we have every video we've ever done over the past year on that youtube channel so you can check that out and watch them to your heart's content we also send out a weekly email with our our program of the week so if you subscribe to our website in our email list you can get those as well so thank you again for joining us thanks for being here in evergreen cemetery and a shout out to brian kennel the kennel family for all the hard work they've done to keep the cemetery so beautiful so thanks again and have a good night everybody

Channel: Adams County Historical Society at Gettysburg

Views: 11,921

Rating: 4.972158 out of 5

Keywords: Gettysburg, Adams County, Cemetery

Id: Tyi163R-E0Q

Length: 59min 1sec (3541 seconds)

Published: Fri May 21 2021