Gettysburg's Lasting Battle Damage

hello everyone we're just going to wait a second here and make sure that everyone can see us we are testing out some new technology tonight at the Adams County Historical Society I'm Andrew Dalton the executive director and we have here with us tonight Tim Smith our Collections Manager and historian I'm very excited for a Tim's presentation tonight as I'm sure you all are let us know if you can you can hear us looks like we're good well we are good so without any further ado I'll introduce Tim real quick Tim is a licensed battlefield guide at Gettysburg National Military Park he's the author of 10 books about the Battle of Gettysburg and the local citizens and he's written numerous articles about the Battle of Gettysburg in Adams County history tonight I just want to start by pointing out that this talk is based on an article that Tim wrote in volume 2 of Adams County history which is available for purchase on our website we're gonna put a link in the comment section at some point here tonight but it was written in 1996 which happens to be the year that I was born so if you didn't already know that Tim's an old guy there's more evidence for you but it is an excellent article if you haven't had a chance to read it Tim details all of the buildings in the town that still have a lasting battle damage which is the title of our program tonight and so we're gonna go through that discuss these buildings and the civilians and the downtown's people that lived in them and wrote about them I wanted to start with a quote from from Tim that I find really compelling in the first part of his his article he wrote for the Gettysburg civilians the true horror of war was the constant fear that one of these shells might crash through their wall explode in their home and kill members of their family it does not take a great knowledge of civil war tactics to understand and appreciate that fear so without further ado at first I just want to ask you Tim how did you become interested in documenting the the Battle Damage in Gettysburg and you know it seems like you're the first one who really made an accurate tally of all of the houses that have projectiles in them well I think it started when I became a guide and you know I noticed how excited people would get when you drove by a building that had an artillery shell in it or had bullet holes inside of it you pointed it out to Helmand ATS questions about it and you know as I went around the battlefield I noticed in the town I noticed other buildings that had Battle Damage and you know talking to other guides I asked about the different buildings and if they knew anything about him and I realized that uh it didn't seem to be anyone who even knew like how many buildings actually had artillery shells in them or what the names of the buildings were who lived there or any of the stories of the shells no one had collected all the information you know different people knew about this building or that building or some of the Battle Damage but I wanted to just kind of pull together all the information we had about the building is in the borough right right well let's uh let's get right into that now so I am going to bring up our presentation for tonight and so let's uh let's you know just start with some some information about you know how you you did this study what the parameters were and you know maybe some more famous shots like we have up on the screen here of places where Battle Damage was extremely visible at the time and is still visible today yeah this is the Trostle farm on the Gettysburg battlefield and the barn to this day you can see in the bottom right hand corner has a hole in it where a cannonball went through the barn during the fighting and you know I do lots of tours every year with 8th graders and I always stop the bus at this point and I pointed over at the hole in the barn and you know it's interesting to me even to this day I've seen it hundreds of times but the excitement that people get when they look over and then they see the hole in the barn and realize it was caused by a cannonball during the fighting it's just it's just really intense now you know years ago the 40 farm stood on the first days battlefield and the John 40 farm was sort of dilapidated and removed by the National Park about 1937 but when they've removed the building the rafters of the building were placed in the old rose and steel museum and you might notice today the rafters are at the Museum of the Gettysburg foundation and you can see there is a hole through the rafters in which a projectile doing the battle supposedly they were caused by the projectile during the battle but uh you know people stop there and look out that the rafters in the museum in old museum - and just you're amazed by it now most of the damage on the battlefield or in the town is not artillery shells it's caused by bullets by rifle fire and there's lots of places that you can see on the battlefield itself where there is visual battle damage er lasting battle damage this is the sheriffy house the earliest known photograph of the sheriffy house and it has bullet holes in the side of it but also along the northern side of the house there are three cherry trees and during the battle a cannonball was lodged in one of the cherry trees and you can actually see photographs of this uh-huh there's lots of photographs of it I think I've seen maybe ten different images from starting in the 1880s until about 1920 of the cannonball in the cherry tree and you get the idea that Joseph sheriffy set up a peach stand selling peaches right next to the truly of the counter Bowen and you would tell people come on come over look at my cannonball in the building and then you know some peaches he was a very enterprising farm worth the tourists but this tree sort of died and cannonball was removed and eventually the cannonball was actually donate to the Adams County Historical Society where today as part of my regular daily duties I am sort of the caretaker and protector of the sheriffy cannonball here's an interesting article I found it's from 1897 and I really like this article because it talks about the buildings in the town that have artillery shells in them and it mentions if a shell lodged in a house is there still if it happens to be necessary to repair the house carpenters are instructed not to disturb the shell if a new house goes up on the site of an old one it is ten to one that the shell is carefully removed in this case of wood and placed in the new house as near its former location as possible now we don't have any specific example of that but we're going to talk about some there's kind of a couple of examples we're going to talk about there are close to this and I think that's interesting so in 1897 you know people were looking at the shells of the buildings in town and they were interested in the shells here's another article for this one from 1903 where a tourist is going from the railroad depot and Gettysburg up the cemetery hill and you can see he passed his points of interest like of course the Jennie Wade house which was a big tourist attraction early on and also the place where general Chimel Finnick had hid you know near the garlic house and then he mentions the houses of the town still show the marks of the battle and a shell was noticed embedded in one of the brick walls from which the fuse and powder had been removed so you know we hope that each of the shells that's still in the building in town has been removed at some point into powder and the fuse taken on then and put back into the building hopefully you know um I should mention that there you know the Farnsworth house on Baltimore Street you know a lot of tour guides drive by this house and point out the bullet holes because on a bus tour we're going down Baltimore Street and it's easy to point this building out and show the bullet holes and you know people are generally it's early in the tour and they can see that the town still shows visible Battle Damage good to the next one and you can see in this view on the left the bullet holes and started building and and I highlighted on the right at the bottom you know the owner of the Farnsworth House Lauren Schultz actually paints the bullet hole to make it look white so you can see their bullet holes you know I should mention going around town I'm not an expert on what is a bullet hole in the building and what is maybe a piece of brick that has fallen out of a building and people always ask me oh yeah what do you think is that a board horn I don't know I mean it would be really difficult to go around town and say you look for individual bullet holes in individual Civil War buildings there must be you know 200 building is in town today that we're there at the time of the battle and possibly you know there's a bullet hole in each one somewhere you know on the outside of it it's possible but it's really difficult to tell at least the ones that were in the main part of the battle you can look at them and say wow that's that's that's pretty amazing alright now I wanted to mentioned with the Farnsworth house also um it used to have an artillery shell sticking out of it and I remember when um Lauren Schultz first told me this I I don't know if I believed it or I thought maybe well you know I don't know about that but since he discussed this with me and I found several photographs here's one and you can see there is a artillery shell protruding from the wall up near the top of the building just to the left of the attic window and for a while that building was painted white people didn't really notice the bullet holes as much when I was painted white you can see there's a sign this is a 1936 photograph but there's a sign near the house and it says bullet holes in Walled has an arrow pointing to the wall with the with the bullet holes in it of course on the second and third day of the battle there was a violent sharpshooter action at the edge of the town and sharpshooters from both sides were firing back and forth at each other and a large amount of the buildings in this area suffered battle damage and the ones that were not replaced do still show visible battle damage I here's a that's this photograph where we we just had up was Gettysburg in November 1863 and misses these are photographs taken during the procession leading to the National Cemetery Lincoln's Gettysburg Address but you can see in these photographs the edge of the town of Gettysburg as it appeared in 1863 and in this image on the left of the image is the rub tannery with the smokestack and then just down a little bit and we're just north of where Stein where Avenue comes in today we can see the Farnsworth house which is the Sweeney house at the time of the battle and then beyond it is a little white house the home and house and then we have on the banner house and the garlic house and the shriver house and the piers house up the street and all these buildings suffered some battle damage because of the Sharpshooter action uh here is the home in house from an 1888 photograph this is from the Henry Stewart collection at the Adams County Historical Society and you can see he was actually recording a photograph of the front section of the house illustrating the fact that it had bullet holes in it and here's a close-up of that view and you can see some of the bullet holes above the window and beside the window in this image so we have someone wondering about Jennie Wade's death and how you know whether or not the the bullet that killed Jennie Wade would have come from one of these houses absolutely now you know obviously there were dozens of sharpshooters all over the southern edge of the town and you know we could speculate and tell you where the board came from but undoubtedly the board came from one of these sharpshooters at the edge of the town the earliest known account that talks about where the board came from mentions it came from the rough tannery and then of course behind erupted at a tannery is the Sweeney house and you know a lot of people you know came to believe that it was fired from the attic window the sweetie house as time went on but the point is that during the death of Jennie Wade there were dozens of sharpshooters all over the edge of the town firing up at dozens two sharpshooters all around the Jennie Wade house so it could have come from one of several locations and there's hasn't been a real good study done on where the board came from that would be a neat documentary don't think where did the bullet come from so um or who killed Jennie Wade so here's another photograph at the home in house from about 1890 and today there's a the front part of the house maybe it maybe it's an 1880s photograph or in the front part of the house I think it's the late 1880s there's a brick section on the front but this is the original William Holman house and the bullet holes were just around the side of it and beside it is the Sweeney house on barmer Street just get a better idea of that south street going in between the two houses where we're talking about with Helmut ah now a Vollmer street and Lefevre street there was a fence and there's a sign here and it says on the sign to the right of this image just near our photographs it says bullet holes preserved in fence for visitors and there from the time of the battle until the 1920s or 30s there was this fence along the entrance to what is now the middle school and it was filled with bullet halls and that's the sameö McCreary house on Baltimore Street and today this areas refer to as unity Park and you can people were just amazed by this fence I found actual articles in the newspaper were people writing home and describe the fence on Baltimore Street from the Sharpshooter action and we have a bunch of photographs of this particular fence and I think I'm here in this show I put together the largest collection of bullet hold fenced views of this image to this location ever seen okay here's a Henry Stewart photograph of the fence from 1888 and again he's pretty simple in his captions bullet holes in fence and and Tim a portion of the fence is currently still in the collections of you know a private dealer collector in the area right there is still existing I'm not sure exactly when the fence was removed from Baltimore Street but prior to it prior to it becoming present in the possession of the Gettysburg School District but the section of the fence the first two sections of the fence were actually sold to Lee's headquarters clientele he opened up police headquarters as a museum in the 1920s I have no idea when the fence was moved up there but when I was a kid in the 70s and probably I'm sure some other people cry remember in the 60s at being there that fence was there at Lee said quarters had two sections of the fence on display and then when Lee's headquarters sold in the 1990s a private collector purchased the fence and I actually know the guy it's in his basement and so it still exists this portion of the fence that was there at the time of the battle here's another picture of the fence and this one's from Unity Park looking actually towards the brick section of the Holman house that was placed on there in the late 1880s I believe and what's good to the next one oh here's a modern image from that same location just so you can kind of see where were we're talking about we should give a shout-out to our friends at mr. G's ice cream we are right after the next here's a photograph of the bullet holes in the fence with the Weinbrenner house behind it we're looking across Lefevre Street and of course today that's mr. G's ice cream old-fashioned homemade ice cream and here's another view of that and these two images came from mr. G's Lobby he's a good friend of ours and you know they illustrate again the fence and these are both they're dated I off the top of my head I think they're from 1919 and here's the 1960s view of the Weinbrenner house John Weinbrenner lived there and there are bullet holes in the house and there's a great account by a student from the Lutheran seminary who's hiding in the cellar of that house during the fighting with the Weinbrenner family just writes an extraordinary account of what it was like to hide in one of these houses during the battle and have sharpshooters above you firing out from the doors and windows and mr. G does have that account hanging on this Lobby wall if you go in his own ice-cream shop and you can see here's one of his windows and you can see there's bullet holes in the shutters of course the shutters would have been closed and then there's bullet holes in a brick wall around the shutters and the garlic house Henry garlic lived on Baltimore Street and the garlic house has bullet holes inside of now the garlic's unlike the Farnsworth house where the bullet holes are painted white or the stock house for instance where the building's painted silver you can see the bullet holes the bullet holes are more difficult to detect if they're not highlighted but there are bullet holes in the side of the garlic house and a bunch of around that window near the top of the house the McClellan house or the Jennie Wade house where George William a Coughlin rented at the time with about rtlm by John Howe same guy who in Devil's Den the house where Jennie Wade was killed of course it has bullet holes in the side of it and in early accounts of the Jennie Wade house they see Chazz or maybe like 150 bullet holes in the house which is just a crazy amount of course the most famous bullet holes are the bullet holes through the door which killed Jenny wait and again there are probably many more buildings in town that have bullet holes in them but no one's ever really taken on that study to try to determine what a bullet hole is and what a bullet hole isn't and where they are Eldad almond house although stone really doesn't show bullet holes well the bullet chips a piece off and it wears and so it you know stones are not the same as bricks but on the Dobbin house at the South Gabe all the Dobbin house and this is a view from Washington Street looking across Washington Street towards the Dobbin house and towards Cemetery Hill you can look at the south gable the house above the stone and it is brick and it is it is perforated bullet holes on that south Gable so you can actually see marks it about on the diamond house as well now my study is more about the buildings in town they'd still have artillery shells sticking out of them and you know that's a lot easier than trying to determine whether a mark in a building is from a bullet during about or not we're actually talking about things that are sticking out of the building that you can actually see now when when I first determined that we'd do a study like this I talked to people I decided you know what was a artillery shell was not an artery show there were several people told me locations where they said there were shells and it turns out to be just a pipe sticking out of the wall wasn't this year so I wanted to determine if it was an artillery shell I had a person who was an expert on artillery tell me what kind of artillery shell was sticking out of each of the walls and then I tried to determine a little bit about the building during the Civil War was the building standing during the battle that's an important thing I've had as an artillery shell sticking out and then of course is there a specific account by the family who lived there of an artillery shell hitting the building during the battle there's a lot of different things I wanted to include in this study but I decided I would just do the borough just what is in the borough of Gettysburg and so I came with nine buildings in the borough that have artillery shells when I say in the borough here's the banner farm and the banner farm does have an artillery shell sticking out at the back of the house and it is from the battle and you know you know whether it was cemented in later or not I I'm not sure but it does have an artillery shell sticking out of it and but it's instrument Township so I'm not counting one's there on the battlefield or you know we're just talking about in the borough and so um the first and second building is that we're going to talk about our own Stratton Street North Strand Street one and two in our study and this is number one and this is the house and this is a Hotchkiss shell that is sticking out of it it's been a while since um I've talked about this John is the owner of the Brickyard that is not far from this house and that of course is today we refer to as Koster Avenue and that's where the mural of the fighting that occurred on the afternoon of July 1st exists and he owned that property this is a similar house I think it was this is an 1859 house off the top of my head and we don't have a specific account about their artillery shell in this building but I was able to find a 1908 account by a New York veteran it comes back to Gettysburg did mentions that there's an artillery shell sticking out of the house at that time one of the things was I want to try to determine whether these artillery shells were really from the barrel and had flown and you start in the building or if they were cemented in there later and so them obviously are in later but usually they're cemented end to mark where an artillery shell struck the building during the fighting so across the street is the Barbie henhouse I should mention the two house is at 221 North Strand street and across the street at 218 North Strand Street is the Barbie Han house and this house is built about 1861 and two different families were living there the family of the Barbie Han family and the family of the George Krass if I believe correctly it's been a while since I've spoken about this specifically but down the side of the building there is an artillery shell sticking out of it it's not easy to see it's on the north wall of the building and it is a three-inch read channel sticking out of the building number three is right near the square of Gettysburg and it is the Wills building I think we generally refer to this as and again it's a building that was constructed just prior to the Civil War by David wills I remember when the park was doing the wills house project it was discovered that this building which was designed for a store fronts just prior to the war and the Wills house itself had a common basement they didn't have a wall you just walked from the basement all along both of the buildings which is kind of really odd but David wills owned this not only the house where you know he lived where Lincoln stayed when he came to give the Gettysburg Address on the right but also you can see I took this photograph during the reconstruction of the Will's house but also he had these two buildings that were the storefronts there on the left now in the second floor of this building on the right hand side or the west side was the Tison brothers photographic studio at the time of the battle and in this case we have a specific account where a soldier how was friends a soldier that had served in a 10th New York cowboy that was stationed in Gettysburg in 1861 1862 was good friends with one of the Tyson's and had written an article about the battle later and had a letter from Tyson in his article and Tyson described the artillery shelled a builder Andrew do you want to read that yeah sure so we have the the quote from Tyson we found the gallery undisturbed the wife of lawyer David wills claimed to have prevented the men from going into the gallery by telling them it was dangerous they however entered the cellar and emptied a barrel of 95% alcohol I had a gross of 8 ounce bottles and they were seen carrying these bottles out filled with alcohol the shell has never been removed it is still there just as it was ready to blow somebody up perhaps some time or other a minie ball passed through the back window which was raised passing through both panes of glass cutting a round hole through the first pane without cracking the glass so it's a fascinating account we have of this house and I'm sure many of you know this property as the cannonball malt shop which I used I think it's it's closed now but we do have a picture that Tim's provided of the cannonball malt shop no I'm sorry to see the cannonball malt shop closed you know I knew the owners pretty well and we had sort of a running argument or discussion about it it was kind of a running joke about it and I I would send people to the cannonball malt shop and I would have them go up to the person to the counter and say you know that's not a cannonball of course it's an artillery shell and I had lectured them endlessly on the incorrect name of their ice cream shop it should have been artillery shell malt shop and not to count of all Molotov I don't think they thought it had the same appeal or ring and this is one of the more authentic shells though in the town you know as well you'll continue to discuss though I mean we I think from the account I mean it's pretty clear that this is you know an original shell that it's is still in place from where it hit or near where it hit the building yeah and again hopefully at some point they pulled that out they took the fuse out took the powder out and cemented it back in you can see the cement around the place where it hit and from the direction of course it looks like this came from around Oak Hill which would make perfect sense right they come the first day of the battle but it would you know it would be really awkward if one of these buildings still had powder in it and the building caught on fire or something like that you know black powder is very unstable and we're always wondering about you know these these types of things but theoretically all these shells have been removed and a powder taken out and then cemented layer right you wouldn't want to live in a house with a live shell so um number four that we'll talk about let's see we do have we have one question was the malt shop and embalming station after the battle was there any embalming done at that site that we know of I mean I guess everywhere never heard anything like that there right right but of course no because that every structure yeah I'm not sure maybe with the well you know I guess would you know what they might be referring to is the fact that there are storefronts that wills rents out at the time of the Civil War there and there is an account where maybe wills rents to an embalmer okay so that's why what you're referring to but do I know off the top my head I do not know if it's there might be mentioned in the Wills House Museum that he on a bomber for a short time after the battle makes a business renting one of his storefronts so um this is the Gettysburg female Institute and this is a the school ran by Rebecca I stir at the time of the Civil War now this building probably built around 18:13 1814 it's been used as a classical school and then also it became the first home of the Lutheran Theological Seminary and then it was later the first home of that Gettysburg College or Pennsylvania College and then it was a girls school at the time of the battle so it'd been used for school purposes most of its history and during the fighting it was used as a hospital during and after the battle and a reed shell hit the building and you know stuck in the building I had been in this building we were the owner of this building is a very good friend in the Adams County Historical Society and you know we've known for years I've been up to the room there is a bulge inside of the room rate we'd expect where the bricks are pushed in where the artillery shell hit their damage around the bricks it appears to me that this shell hit the building stuck in it and has been there ever since it doesn't seem like this is something that's been placed in there or redone in any way it's fascinating in that respect and here's a photograph from the 1880s a William Tipton photograph it's actually this an interesting photograph because it's taken from the other side of the street from Solomon powers granted yard which was located on the corner of Washington Street and West High Street and we're looking south across the stern yard across ty Street and then at the Academy building itself and of course this is in the Gettysburg College history because they were highlighting the history of the college but if you look between the top middle windows you can see where it appears the artillery shell is sticking out of it during this photograph and we have a close-up and you can kind of see the damage on the building and that is right where the shell is I wish we had a clearer version of this so we can actually look at it and say yes that's the same shell but I feel pretty confident it is now I'm number five let's see Oh number five is the Gettysburg Methodist parsonage and another better I'm very familiar with I've talked about this building for years but even before one of our licensed benefit guides lives there now so again I've been inside this building it's fascinating and this one has a a an explosive cannonball a shell or a shot I guess you'd say a 12-pounder cannonball a shower case and you can see the hole in the front with the fuse would go and now it's fascinating look into dis building you can look at the front of it and you can tell right away the dad doesn't look like a civil war builder and let's start good to the next one um this is a photograph of the building from the 1880s again a Henry Stewart photograph and restored lived on Baltimore Street and so he took a lot of photographs of the buildings along the street and I've showed just a third one of his eye she had already but you can see the key shots sticking out of the building just to the right of the top window and what happened was at some later point I don't know if I have the exact date or not they actually renovated the building and as that article mentioned from 1897 the carpenters were told to you know pull the shell out and then when he renovated they replaced a shell at the same spot where you know the building original shell was sticking out of the building now this bit is kind of interesting because this house we have a specific account about the artillery shell hitting the house and this is the kind of thing that I was looking for when I decided I would do this article and I hope injury you probably have the article there ready you can read the quote we do have so the quote is about Laura bergstresser who's the the minister's daughter she was thirteen years old at the time of the battle you know like many families you know before they were you know in the cellar they were you know still wandering about the house as the battle was going on and from across the street Tilly Pierce was watching out her window directly across at the bergstresser house and she wrote during the first day's battle after our men had retreated a little girl was standing at the second-story window of the house opposite hours she had the shutters bowed and was looking down into the street and confusion below suddenly a shell struck the wall just beside the shutter tearing out a large hole and scattering pieces of brick mortar and plaster all around the room in which the little girl was standing it entered and struck some some places of the room and then rebounded and fell out into the street another ball is now placed in the wall to mark the place where the first one struck I am here reminded of the fact that many persons while walking or riding past this place and having their attention called to the shell sticking in the wall neatly encased in brick and mortar think that it has been there just as it arrived on the first day of the battle shells were not quite so tidy and introducing themselves at that time the little girl who had this narrow escape preferred - his Laura bergstresser daughter of the Methodist minister in Gettysburg so an excellent quote and story and then of course there's another story that the Tim includes here in this article from one of her brother one of bergstresser sons writing the rebel sharpshooters occupied the roof of the parsonage during the battle some years after when balls of carpet rags that were hanging in the garret were unwound many bullets were found a shell struck the parsonage over the second-story window throwing quite a quantity of brick and mortar into the room my sister Laura was standing at the window the shell rebounded into the street and is now I think cemented in the wall so two really wonderful accounts of this house and the shell that struck although today the shell as Tim has pointed out is not exactly in the in the right spot okay so number where we at number six oh yeah number six this Schmucker house oh and I wanted to mention that we'll put that map that I just showed we'll put it on our Facebook site tomorrow and so if anybody wants to they can get that image and print it out and then use that map to go around town we do have just a couple questions someone's asking is there was there any concern digging the graves at Gettysburg that they would encounter live shells I think you know we I don't know if we have any accounts of that but we certainly have a wealth of accounts of live shells on the battlefield and shortly afterwards the children young people in Gettysburg went out and gathered as many relics as they could to sell to tourists and there were you know several maybe I think Tim would know the exact number but at least five or six incident incidences where the shell exploded and either killed or severely wounded the the person who had been trying to gather the relics inners an account by Martin Luther Weikart and he claims that his plow hit an artery and it exploded and blinded him but it turns out he's actually blinded working with dynamite when he's working on the railroad behind Little Round Top so he but it sounded better that his plow hit the artillery shell but up there since the specific asked about digging graves Brian kennel buy a good friend who's the superintendent of the Evergreen Cemetery I don't know if it was him personally or his father but in the Evergreen Cemetery there are two artillery shells they have on display that were found while they were digging the graves more modern but yes obviously and you know so artillery shells occasionally are found around town during construction projects and so I know a few of them but they don't they haven't exploded when people hit him with her shovel or anything like that we have one other question just about the I stir building if the shell was never really touched after it hit does it still contain powder good maybe we should check later you know theoretically all these artillery shells have been pulled out and they've been emptied of their powder and replaced I was just pointing out without when it man does it look like it you know it hit it an exact spot and did a lot of damage to the wall now here's one that obviously was cemented in there later because at the Schmucker house there were once windows on the south side of the house and right where there used to be a window it's bricked in and there's an artillery shell cemented into the area right near where the window and the wall met and I suspect it's meant to mark the site of where an artillery show hit during the battle I have been in this house also you can see the damage in bricks around it and this would be the you know I'm not an artillery person but the sabot of the the back of the artillery shell and you know this is a 10-pounder parrot shell so you know the front of it should be sticking out of the wall inside the building and it's not so you know I don't I don't know the exact story here if you pull that out you know are we gonna find it it's just the end of the shell and it's not the whole shell um it's interesting this is the home of Samuel Simon Schmucker of course the first professor of the Lutheran Theological Seminary and this is up on seminary Ridge actually not far from our headquarters here at the Adams County Historical Society and this schmuck er wrote an account about the damage of the seminary after the battle was over and I think he mentions in his account in Andrew probably hazard air that there were Confederate artillery pieces placed near his house firing at Cemetery Hill and they drew artillery fire towards his house and I think he might mention it got hitched 13 times by artillery shells during the battle which you know makes a lot of sense so the shell marks where one hit yeah we do have a quote 13 cannonballs or shells pierced the walls and made holes several several of which were from 2 to 3 feet in length and nearly as broad window frames window frames were shattered to pieces and the greater part of the glass and the house was destroyed yeah and so this one definitely is is cemented into a pot that used to be a window you can tell that when you look at you can't tell them the photograph what are you out there and you look on the brick pattern you can tell that there were two windows that were just they decided to take him out and just break them in and one interesting thing about this artillery I remembered I did my article that um it just came out in 1996 and professor Wentz at the Lutheran seminary Fred whence his father had lived in that house abdel went and he wrote a history of the Schmucker house and fred had lived there for a while when he was a kid his dad lived there and he told me that that artillery shell was not in that building when he was a kid as if you know it was cemented and much more recently but then I did talk to some old battlefield guys like Jim Tate and Jim Tate said no it's been there for a long time and I don't know one way another who was right or who was wrong but it's fascinating to me that our artillery shell can be in a building and people live there don't have a recollection it has an artillery shell on it that seems so strange but I guess the Gettysburg that kind of thing oh we got bullet holes in our buildings you know just a natural occurrence so we have a question how far away were the cannons that were firing these types of shells so you know a rifled artillery shell can fire be fired two miles maybe a little we have a question kind of asking whether they were targeting civilian areas in any way and you know I would say we don't have any evidence to suggest that but you know a lot of the kid you know the cannons fire artillery you think about the artillery during the battle is cannons are firing from seminary Ridge all along seminary Ridge and in the fields north of town and east of the town and northern cannons are south of the town and the counters are firing over the town and remarkably there are very few incidents where explosive shells land in the town and create a lot of damage there's some buildings damaged and but you know no one in the town is killed by an artillery shell during the battle no civilians that's remarkable so it's it's you know it's just gettysburg's in a little bit of a dip and they're firing over the town and these artillery shells in the buildings are ones that drop short now the Schmucker house I mean if you just look at a map of the battle and you see these Confederate artillery units on seminary Ridge you understand why that house drew fire from the Union Army but no they're not targeting these houses it just happens to be shells falling short or just inadvertently hitting the buildings now where where are we number seven number seven is one of my favorite artillery shells and it's the David Troxel house on the third block of Chambersburg Street it's 221 Chambersburg Street and the building of course today is painted a purple but if you look at where the elbow is there in the rain spout there is a Schenkel shell sticking out of the building and David Troxel lived here at the time of the battle and there were a bunch of he must had a nice basement because a bunch of his neighbors assembled in his basement during the battle and I don't know if I I tried to come up with an exact count but we have two different civilian accounts by people who were in the cellar of this house during the fighting and according to one of them there were 22 people and David Troxel seller and on the second day in the battle an artillery shell hit the building while these people are in the cellar and they hear it hit the building they know an artillery shell is in the building and they just wait for it to explode and it never explodes and then after the battle they go out and the artillery shell was sticking out of the building unexploded right and we do have the quote there so it comes from Sarah broadheads diary who I think Tim will point out where she lived exactly not too far actually just adjoining this property her Diaries fascinating one of the most you know detailed primary sources that we have from civilians in Gettysburg she wrote on July 2nd about 4 p.m. the storm burst again with terrific violence it seemed as though heaven and earth were being rolled together for better security we went to the house of a neighbor Trachsel and occupied the seller by far the most comfortable part of the house while there a shell struck the house but mercifully it did not burst but remained embedded in the wall one half protruding that's used to me now again if we look at this building you'll notice and the lady who I should met preface this the lady who wrote that accountant Andrew just quoted from lived in the building directly to the right of it at the end of the Warren block and Sarah broad head she was a renter at the time and I think it's at 219 217 I forget the address of Sarah broadheads house but she lived in the building just to the right in the image but if you look at the David Troxel house again much like the method's parsonage on Boerner street that doesn't really look much like a civil war building so let's go to the next image now this is a photograph it's an extreme enhancement of a photograph from seminary Ridge and this photograph is actually taken right out the front door of the Adams County Historical Sonny rate in our yard looking across towards the town and in this image you can see the war in block we caught that big building in the center of the photograph and all the way to the left of the building is Sarah broadheads house and that empty space beside it is where the David Troxel house with the cannonball in it is located today and right away when I was researching this I I knew this it wasn't like I didn't know I I had to figure this out I knew that that building wasn't there now but if you look back look back from the street no I don't mean go back if you look back from the street now you'll see the Troxel house is there but it's it's back off the street and in around I don't remember what date I suspect around 1920 they put a huge front addition onto the house and they obviously took the artillery shell out of the original section in the house pulled it out and moved it around and put it back in the front section of the house where it is today so and if you go there today to that location I've been in that location and there the back of that house still is there but it's you know that wall that they took to show that would be an interior wall in that house up in the attic today oh and one thing one thing more since we got that slide let's go back to the slide before that um the one with the broad head house okay uh one thing I'd like to read and you know there are quotes by people in the battle and civilians that you hear that over and over again they're dramatic and I gotta tell you one of my favorite quotes of all time is written by Sarah broadhead about hiding in the basement of the house not during the second day when the artillery shell hit but the next day during the bombardment preceding Pickett's Charge and this quote has been used over and over again because it's so good again the battle began with an earthly fury nearly all the afternoon it seemed as if the heavens and earth were crashing together the time that we sent in the cellar seemed long listening to the terrible strife more terrible never greeted human ears we knew that with every explosion in the scream of each shell human beings were hurried through excruciating pain into another world and that many more were lying torn and mangled and lying in torment worse than death and no one able to extend relief the thought very made me very sad and feel that if as God's will I would rather be taken away than live to see the misery that would follow some thought this awful afternoon would never come to a close we knew that the rebels were putting forth all their might and it was a dreadful thought that they might succeed I I think people have used that over and over again but you know can you imagine being in a house and listening to the artillery shells flying over the town and again not knowing if one would hit the house you were in and exploded and kill your family we do have a we have one question here about the the Schultz house near us up on seminary Ridge if you've ever noticed any damage to the wall recently something recently um someone told me that they had toured the house humans for sale currently and there is a shell fragment sticking out of the eastern portion of the house I had never ever heard that until this might be the same person asking that ask me last week but you know that is a Civil War house although it's been greatly greatly renovated and honestly I'd never heard that but I don't doubt that there are buildings around town that have you know Battle Damage in them today that I don't know about because there's you know possibility of this you know these things you've just been forgotten okay so we're on number let's see eight Oh an AIDS near the center of the town also it's the Moses McLean house Moses McLean was one of the more prominent Gettysburg citizens at the time of the battle he was a former United States congressman had served a term in Congress he was a lawyer in the town he died shortly after the Civil War but his house and you can see from the photograph of the house it's the old surfing's hardware store and now of course it's a Christmas the Christmas house it's a it's a place where you can buy Christmas ornaments every day of the year but the front of the house has been renovated it was renovated prior or just around the time it was used as surfing's and but you can actually see that the side of the house is the original part of the house and it's just been renovated a little bit and there is a 20-pound parrot shell sticking out of the building not far from the roof of the building on the side of it so you can see that on Baltimore Street in surfing alley it's really easy to point out and you can look for that if on your travels around town he's my pal all right here's a photograph of Baltimore Street from the square of Gettysburg taken in 1863 and in this view if you look down bald I'm sure you of course you have the shipbuilding or sometimes they call it the house of bender or you know you I think it has a sign on the house of time now and you go beyond it where there's the Union cigar store and then beyond that the red brick building with an actual square pump in front of it that's the Moses McLean house and it's a two and a half story building with dormer windows on it now we have a specific account that the 20-pound period 20-pounder paracho that's sticking out of it today was cemented in there in the 1870s by George stock who opened a cigar store in the building but he cemented it in to mark the place where a cannonball came through the attic wall at the time of the battle and we do have on the count of the cannonball hitting the building right so this is a an account from Elizabeth McLean she was 15 years old at the time of the battle she wrote on Friday which would have been July 3rd my mother said she would take the featherbed to the garret where the others were neatly packed away she went up to get the place ready for it and came down to get someone to help carry it up while she was down there a loud crash and a shell came tearing through a 15 inch brick wall striking a beam that supported the roof split in two broke out a rung from the crib in which we had slept when children and having spent its force rolled down the stairs to the first landing the garret was filled with a cloud of brick dust and we thought it was on fire but the shell did not explode that's another original account so this is one of one of hundreds of accounts that we preserve at the Historical Society from the local residents um you know as young as 15 or even younger who were writing much later I think this accounts from 1908 I also want to point out that of course JL schick John Lauren chick had a store on the square of Gettysburg at the time of the battle you can see in this photograph his sign over his door off to the right and he has an interesting account of the battle and I like his account he mentions that he was so nervous during the first day of the fighting he smoked twenty-one cigars that's one way to handle it so here is a picture of Moses McLean and his family this photograph is a group photograph recorded prior to his death i think it's an 1869 photograph and it's recorded in the Tison brothers studio and it's interesting for me to know to look at this photograph and realize that between the two windows where the curtains are pulled down there's an artillery shell on the outside of that window you know no wall that's where the artillery shell is and here's another picture of Moses McLean around 1870 taken in front of his house on Baltimore Street with his granddaughter's sitting on the steps there so our last one on number nine is of course the sheets house this house was built in 1862 and you know generally it's referred to as the Carrie sheets house because Carrie sheeds ran a girls school out of his house at the time of the battle but it was actually Elias sheeds house he was the father and his wife and he had three daughters and four sons at the outbreak of the war and of course Carrie starting in you know 1860 late 1861 1862 started a girls school here so they're all also girls boarding here Elias EADS had four sons that served in the Union Army all four sons would end up dying as a result of the war to a die during the war and two died early on afterwards Carrie died she never married her sister Elizabeth died she never married there was a daughter of Louisa who died early on after the war there was one grandchild that eventually she died she never married so this particular family ceased to exist you know problem as a direct result of the Civil War they not move on but this house let's go back one this house does have I want to show on the bottom right-hand side on artillery shells sticking out of it and it is the front part it is the front we're looking at the front of the shell and of course you know the story always was that this artillery kal shell came through the rear of the house came through the front of the house and stuck in the wall and unlooked very hard for accounts of this artillery shell and perhaps an artillery shell hitting during the battle we do have an account by a guy named ace ASA Hardman of the 3rd Indiana cavalry who was in that building as a hospital steward during the battle and he mentions artillery shells hitting the house fired from Cemetery Hill but of course that would make it being point that would have been pointing in the other direction and that makes a lot more sense I was finally able to find an account by a visitor who came here during Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and was touring the battlefield and specifically mentioned that he stopped at Kyra sheaves school and it was a large hole in the roof under the eve of the roof so you know in this one I I believe there's probably a hole there they they filled in the hole they repaired it and he put a cannon or an artillery shell in the wall to mark where an artillery shell hit during the battle and no question yeah we do have a question just someone asking you know was there an area of the town that was more well you know it was more badly damaged than than other areas and I guess we'd say the southern part of the town with all of the the skirmishing and the fighting in the streets there's a lot more damage from bullets but you think from shell fire that there's a certain area that's damaged more than than others no I think I think probably that damage at the southern edge of the town and from artillery fire and infantry fire is probably the worst um I just wanted to show that here's a photograph by Mathew Brady taken right after the Battle of the side of the sheets house and a bunch of people used to tell me they would say oh well you know the artillery show came through the roof of the building and it's get out the front of the building and you can look at the roof and although on the right side of the roof there's a little black dot that's just a dot on the image itself there's no damage to the roof so you know it either came through all the way through the building into stuck or it was cemented than or later and it seems more logical but that one is but again it's cemented in to mark the spot where Ana till Rochelle is known to have struck the building during the fighting we don't know how much the image to the town there was after the battle that went unrecorded by photographs and was repaired I think if we saw actual photographs of some other areas of the town and how damaged they were we might be stunned but we just don't have a record of it and let's get to the next one uh and the reason I say this is the stock house on South Washington Street so again this is a house that has damage on the side of it and you know the guy who owns it years ago painted a silver and it's really nice to deepen it at silver because we can see the bullet holes and this particular house again is one the tour guides ride by on their tours of the battlefield it's easy to come off from the Visitor Center ride down the Taneytown Road into washington street to get to the first day's battlefield and i used to do that i used to come down this street a lot on my tours i remember specifically at a tour with foreign exchange students and a bunch of were from france and we were going down the street and i pointed out this building and i'd point out the bullet holes and usually people but these kids started laughing and i turned to their teacher and i said what are they laughing about and the teacher said 'all every building in france has bullet holes in it and it just struck me that maybe bullet holes in the building are not exciting to people from countries in which you know I sustained a lot of damage during wars but this building you can see the damage and again we have a specific account the disability was hit by artillery fire during the fighting and the idea is that there were sharpshooters in the window they're firing at Cemetery Hill which had a clear view of this building at the time and they rolled an artillery piece according to the account down off of Cemetery Hill and he fired a shot against the side of the building and you can see the marks of the key shot on the building along with bullet holes but we had two storey guides knew about it we're telling the story we have an idea of what about all damage looks like and then about three years ago out of the blue a Samuel Fisher Corley's photograph of this house appeared on eBay and I don't think I was prepared to see the disability was much more substantially damaged than I had previously thought there is a building that used to stand on Cemetery Hill near the Steinway Avenue Emmitsburg Road intersection was owned by Sophia Devine during the battle and her claims file it mentioned that the house was horribly damaged during the battle and that house was removed we have no idea the damage the dad house suffered or what that house looked like after the battle but look at the damage of this structure immediately after the battle and then of course they were paired dad you can still see holes battle damage in the building but nothing like that right and we do have that actually answers a question we had which was you know where these shells actually that effective if they're just crashing into buildings and staying there but you know it is definitely the case that there are many many many more shells that are actually doing great damage to buildings in the town like this one here and of course you know here's a sort of event and now view of that building and you know the damage on it and we'll get to the next one and you know here at the Adams Kent Historical Society I already mentioned that on that building actually looks a lot the same design as the Sweeney house or the Farnsworth house at the time of the battle they have the exact same dimensions at the time of the battle even with the attic window offset a little bit the exact number of doors and windows on the building in the back of the house is the same and of course they were both severely damaged during the bow and then here is an image of that stock house and I found from a 1903 I believe it is tour book of the battlefield so you can see it was something that people had pointed out not just in recent years but the Battle Damage has pointed out for years and years and years by tour guides and here at the Adams County store across aadhi we do collect information about the town in the battle and the civilians who live there at the time and what they went through so if you're interested in more learning more about this you can always buy the Journal article that we wrote about the building from our website but you if you get an opportunity you might come up here and we have files with civilian accounts to describe what it was like to be in the town during the fighting right thank you Tim and I just want to point out that uh let me put it back onto if I can the video here so we can close things out if you if you have a chance to we'd really appreciate if you'd visit our website it's wwa chspe org you can sign up for our newsletter there we put out a newsletter every month with all kinds of announcements about programs and hopefully an announcement about reopening when things are a little bit more normal but we hope you'll take a chance to look at our website and scroll through some of our finding aids and databases that we have available for free on there and if you enjoyed this presentation of please consider joining or making a small donation through our website we'd really appreciate the support but we'll be trying to bring these programs to you every week if we can for the next couple months here so well thank you all for joining us tonight and thank you Tim for for sharing all this incredible research with with everybody

Channel: Adams County Historical Society at Gettysburg

Views: 32,869

Rating: 4.8638296 out of 5

Keywords: Gettysburg, Civil War, Battle of Gettysburg, 1863, History

Id: XYu6yqIo5O0

Length: 67min 17sec (4037 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Kurgen22]

The town of Gettysburg got off easy. Vast parts of other cities were destroyed and there were even rural counties where practically every farm was either stripped bare and fields and crops destroyed.