Gettysburg's Bloodstained Sniper's Nest (at The Shriver House) | History Traveler EP 140

[Music] whenever you come to the town of gettysburg it would be very easy to forget that the the battlefield isn't necessarily to the north to the west or to the south where you're walking these streets you're actually standing on the battlefield and the the people who lived in this area all experienced the battle just like the soldiers and to me their stories are are just as interesting kind of like the story of george shriver and his family george was a man who had moved into town he had had he had inherited his dad's distillery moved to town to open up a a saloon and a 10-pin bowling alley and he lived right here in this very spot and this home was going to be at the center of some of the most vicious fighting during the three-day battle of gettysburg [Music] [Music] so the view that we are currently looking at is north along the old baltimore pike and on the afternoon of july the first as confederate troops were pouring into the city from the north and from the west you would have seen thousands of union troops marching down these streets as they were moving along towards cemetery hill one girl described him as being so thick that you could walk from one side of the street to the other on the tops of their heads and they would have walked right in front of this house right here this is the old shriver house at the time it was known as the shriver saloon and 10 pin alley and the story of what these people went through during the battle of gettysburg is simply incredible so we're gonna go inside and learn a little bit more about the shrivers and the civilian experience during the battle of gettysburg all right so uh we just got in here uh this the area that i'm in right now is more of the museum welcome center the actual shriver house is next door but there is a pretty incredible restoration story uh from from dell and nancy that i is just too cool so my husband and i moved to gettysburg back in 1984 to open up the very first bed and breakfast here in town we quickly realized that all the visitors talked at the breakfast table about general lee and the wheat field and the beach orchard but they never talked about the people that lived here so we thought we would tell those stories we looked for an old house and the plan was to fix it up to make it look like the 1860s and tell the stories of families from all around town after lots of searching we discovered a house on baltimore street right in the middle of town that's the way it looked it turns out it was abandoned for almost 30 years and it was a disaster but it was the perfect house so we bought the house started doing the renovation and in the middle of doing the restoration we under we began to understand the story of the family who lived in there during the battle and it turned out that the shrivers of the family that their story is just so incredible we decided if you're going to stand on their floorboards you ought to hear their story this is the way the house looked was built it was built in 1860 they moved in around christmas and of course four months later the civil war began but the shrivers were a wealthy family when they built the house that was going to be their new business as well it was going to be called shriver saloon and 10 pin alley in the cellar is where george built his saloon and in the backyard he built a two-lane fully enclosed 10-pin bowling alley the house today um we don't have anything at all that belonged to the shriver family however we are very lucky the drivers left this is a portion of the inventory that the drivers took of their home when they lived in there we used that inventory to refurnish the house so all of the furnishings in the house there are antiques they are from the time period but they did not belong to the schreiber family all right now we're getting ready to go over into the house but first i wanted to show this display case whenever dell and nancy were renovating the home well they started finding all kinds of original items throughout the house so so this place is really uh as much of an archaeological site as anything else so here you can see some different civil war bullets that would have been used by the confederacy uh here are some smashed bullets that were found in the walls oh and something else that's kind of funny during the civil war era whenever you built a house it was considered good luck to put a shoe in the wall uh well this is the shoe that they uncovered it's a child shoe yeah that that is really incredible oh yeah and here's here's what the original wallpaper would have looked like in the shriver's kitchen i love that they've included this [Music] whenever you come to the shriver house what you're looking at is a human story of the battle of gettysburg well this is the shriver family this is henrietta weikert's driver who went by hedy this is her husband george washington shriver now he would have been off to war at the time the the battle of gettysburg was fought and then this is a picture of their two daughters sadie and molly so yeah there's the the shriver family okay so uh just got into the the main house here and uh wow this is nice this room right here is the parlor uh now in a previous episode i was at the jenny wade house which is just down the street from here um it's interesting to note the difference the the wade family was i guess you could say a poorer family and the shrivers were more well to do and and you can really see the difference in the two houses whenever you visit them but both were equally impacted by the the battle that took place in this town take a little bit closer look at this room now again all of this is period furniture which which i think is great that they've done now at the time of the battle i mentioned the that george was already gone he was in the military uh hedy ended up leaving the home with her two daughters because of the fighting that was taking place to the north and to the west of the town and they ended up going south to the weikert farm to stay with her relatives and well battle ended up following them there so [Music] all right heading up to the next level now and up here wow this is so nice up here is where you would have had some of the bedrooms here is a spare bedroom in here and then this would have been [Music] the bedroom for the girls i love that they have like kind of brought you into the 1800s with all of this original furniture or original period furniture i guess i should say very cool [Music] go [Music] okay i'm moving up now to oh people in the civil war were short uh i'm moving up now to the area of the attic and to me whenever you come to the shriver house uh this might be at least my favorite part all right so on the day of july first whenever the confederates were sweeping through the town of gettysburg here on the south side of town well they would have also occupied the shriver house and confederate snipers would have set up i guess you could say kind of an overwatch position right here in the attic of the shriver family this is cool as heck all right now one thing that nancy told me is that there was a man next door by the name of pierce who stayed in his home during the battle and he could look through that window over there and see the confederates knocking loopholes through the brick in the wall because obviously you wouldn't want to set up by this window because that would be an obvious spot and union troops would be shooting at it and you can see this other loophole setup right here that is amazing [Music] [Music] okay now there's another cool story attached with this space uh they they had a csi investigator come up into this attic area and they sprayed this whole space down with a luminol like substance to see if there were there was any blood this whole area all through here in front of these loopholes just completely lit up blue under this substance so obviously there had been some confederates who breathed their last breath right here in this space and nancy was telling me that whenever they sprayed the walls like you could see blood spatter all over the walls and in this spot right here you could actually see a hand print and then you could see smears where they had been wiping the blood absolutely crazy she also told me that there's bullet marks outside this window so we're going to crawl through and take a look outside too [Music] all right little window little window okay and a little bright and it's a little windy as well uh so yeah let me take a look and see if we can find some of these bullet marks all right so here's what the loophole looks like from the outside the the area that that was knocked out and then you can see every once in a while these little spots that are filled in with concrete that's where bullet strikes were i don't know if that's one or not i guess it could be also if you look [Music] well here let me go over here there are some spots there which might be some bullet strikes but this spot right here in the wood is also another spot where a bullet strike was and they have that filled in just so that you know bees and hornets and whatnot don't get in and then here's the other loophole from the outside very very interesting now in july of 1863 this would have been the south facing side of the house so this roof that i'm standing on would not have existed this would have been all open space and if we walk over here kind of to the edge i don't want to get too close to the edge because i'm not exactly cool with heights especially windy heights there would have been no trees through there and if you see the monument in the distance there on cemetery hill [Music] well the confederate snipers sharpshooters that were occupying this position would have had a clear view all the way up there [Music] so on july the 7th hedy and her daughters sadie and molly would have walked back into the town of gettysburg to reoccupy their home and there's writing saying that you know the the roads were all torn up so they had to walk through the field and it would have just been horrific there would have been all kinds of uh just just death and destruction that that this woman and her two little girls were walking through and whenever they got back here to their home what they would have seen is a barricade that had been built by the confederates out in front of their house and no doubt some of their furniture was a part of that barricade and this room right here shows what they might have walked into [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] i'm going to go ahead and say that i have never seen another i guess you could say like house museum that has ever portrayed this element of warfare and what the civilians would have come back to whenever they reoccupied their homes uh i i just can't even imagine the sights and and the smell uh that that would have been here um there was there was one account of a family here in gettysburg whenever they got back in the kitchen there was an inch of blood on the floor because the soldiers had been butchering hogs on the table and there are all kinds of little things that you can look for i'm not going to point them all out you can come here yourself and and see it here's one that i do want to point out this is a facsimile of a letter to a mr culp it says mr culp your house tore up pretty bad but we will do it a good deal more next summer if you do not quit burning up our houses turning our women and children out of doors when this you see remember ninth regiment of alabama volunteers like i said that's a facsimile of an actual letter that was left not in this home but in another home but wow this is impactful we've moved down into the cellar now and uh this is in the area that's just adjacent to what would have been the the saloon here in the shriver house and as i've mentioned before in gettysburg any barn any church any open space was turned into a medical treatment center of some kind so that is what is being depicted right here in the shriver house whenever they were doing the renovations they actually found some medical supplies under the floorboards so it's it's quite probable that you would have had some wounded soldiers right here in this home being treated both during and in the days after battle of gettysburg all right and uh now we're walking into the space that would have served as the saloon here at the shriver house uh very very interesting that they they had this set up basically in their cellar this house is legitimately unlike any other that that i've been in um it's not just a simple house tour whenever you're here you're really getting the the story of the civilians who lived in gettysburg during the battle of gettysburg and i didn't even tell the full story of the shrivers you really have to come to this place uh in order to kind of immerse yourself in the experience and immerse yourself in that story uh definitely learned a lot today this this place was um this is a must stop if you come to gettysburg but anyway for now we're heading off to the next [Music] place [Music] oh hello cat and and it's interesting to note the contrast between the two so the the jenny wades the jenny wade's good lord [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: The History Underground

Views: 451,226

Rating: 4.9383259 out of 5

Keywords: history, civil war, travel, gettysburg, battle of gettysburg, army of the potomac, army of northern virginia, battle of gettysburg documentary, gettysburg movie, history traveler, history underground, gettysburg documentary, jennie wade house, haunted gettysburg, gettysburg ghosts, shriver house, confederate snipers, shriver house gettysburg, shriver house museum

Id: 6TTpxgHN5iA

Length: 20min 56sec (1256 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 20 2021