Photography of The Dunker Church at Antietam: Battlefield Walk and Talk

all right a first-person shooter walking story here i think you caught that that was the dunker church at antietam i'm standing on the dunker church ridge that's the maryland monument and through the trees here you might be able to catch some of the new york state monument and of course the visitor center over there and this hill scene of famous photographs and i'm going to show some of the famous and less famous one uh ones to tell a visual story of the dunker church here which i think require me to stop walking so i hope you'll excuse me of course september 17 1862 the white whitewashed nature standing out against the west woods as it does in the regrown west woods today stands out like a beacon it was very visible from all around and the dunker church became sort of one of the epicenters of the fighting of several epicenters at the battle of sharksburg or the battle of antietam of course uh just a few days later probably september 20th 1862 alexander gardner and his crew recorded uh photos the first photos along with the bloody lane and others around here of uh american dead on a battlefield this is on the ridge right behind me you can see some of the damage to the church over there uh there were several pictures taken of the church um as well as other photos looking off in that direction the photographer almost provided us with the sort of panorama of the area in june of 1863 uh gardner's brother james came back and photographed the repaired dunker church that you can see right here so good dunker church is in great shape right well it was for a while for you know not quite six decades when a terrible windstorm came and leveled the dunker church uh you know and i mean leveled it there's a few different pictures of it this is may of 1921. um you know you may have heard the story before of the three little pigs saying that you know wind can't blow down a brick building well this one did maybe it was a hurricane or maybe it had been weakened by uh relic hunters and souvenir seekers grabbing bricks from the famous structure in any case a guy named elmer boyer came over here at that time and was able to secure um you know some bricks and floorboards uh some of the window frames and things like that and he just kind of disappeared for a while okay um in the meantime they put up another structure on the old foundation here uh this was a service stand a souvenir shop and as shown here let me zoom in on the sign here poffenberger's lunchroom on the foundation of old dunker church man they were using up the marketing this might seem a little bit tasteless but this is the 1930s here does any of us here think it's going to be 2071 before we have the ground zero cafe um in downtown uh you know manhattan so we'll see um like i said it became a service station and whatnot but ultimately the us government is going to be able to secure um this site there in in fact it's actually the maryland uh a county washington county gets it first and the government gets involved and there the structure is taken down and it sits as a foundation for many years for more than a decade um we're talking about some of the 40s and into the 50s it sat just like this and in fact that sign that you see there now is over there near the maryland monument just as a point of interest but around that time back comes a guy that i mentioned before elmer boyer and elmer boyer says hey u.s government guess what i got i got pews i got floorboards i've got bricks i've got window frames and you can have them all for 35 thousand dollars or something like that and the government said no way and he said okay how about three thousand dollars the government said okay yes so they got all of uh boyer stuff and in uh 1961 62 they're going to be able to rebuild the dunker church using partly old materials especially the old boyer's bricks are right there um actually right near the front door the floor boards are the first ones you see when you walk in the window frames a lot of them are original you can see soldiers carvings in them and they did it just in time for the 100th anniversary of the battle september of 1962. of course after that it's going to take a while for the government to secure the land around the duncan church you can even see here it looks like i'm seeing some you know uh you know homes around here and there's the dunker church just among them you see the west woods had been long denuded by then and you'll what you'll find is that this battlefield has been largely preserved in the last 30 years the antietam plan only allowed for thin strips of battlefield land to be preserved and um what i'll say over here is that the national park service other partners the same historic antietam foundation and of course the american battlefield trust have been very involved in trying to uh complete this battlefield and it is getting close i mean even the approach to the bloody lane in the cornfield weren't preserved 30 years ago and what i'm looking at now is something we all did together here at the trust with our partners its shaft and that is what we call the epicenter at antietam because this is where it all came together where the bloody fighting came together that's the hagerstown pike it's bounded by that this is the smoketown road it's bounded by that the east woods the westwoods the cornfield are all on the bounds of this particular property 44 acres that you the members of the american battlefield trust were able to help us secure um several years ago and i'm happy to report that just a few months ago it was transferred to the place it belongs into the holdings of the national park service you

Channel: American Battlefield Trust

Views: 10,198

Rating: 4.977695 out of 5

Keywords: American Battlefield Trust, Civil War Trust, The Dunker Church, Antietam Photography, Sharpsburg Photography, Civil War Photography

Id: OzgC1e_B1YU

Length: 5min 12sec (312 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021