Seven Hours of Combat at Culp's Hill - Gettysburg's Longest Fight: Gettysburg 158 Live!

hey everybody welcome back welcome back to american battlefield trust coverage of gettysburg 158 i'm gary edelman we got chris white behind the camera who you're going to see soon enough and he just nodded to you there and we've got a couple other guests here as well continuing what we've been doing bringing you stories of soldiers and units and sometimes some of their objects here at gettysburg now i am in hopes very much in hopes that you've already seen our full one-hour long march from rock creek up culp hill and over and across other parts of the hill onto some of the land or near some of the land the trust has preserved so we really already covered july 2nd and elements of july 3rd in other words the fight is already done so if we don't do enough here um you know don't worry about it we have that video but let me orient you because you can finally see it from where we stand because of the gettysburg national military parks foundation partnership with the gettysburg foundation we can now look through these woods you can see lower culps hill um behind me that chris is panning to and as we move more over this way you can see sort of the saddle between the two hills over here and you can even from here see upper culp sill over there this is something you haven't been able to see from here in the summer in a century so my compliments to the park and the foundation for the great work that they're doing here so um you know what i would just say is that we're talking about july 3rd on culps hill um elsewhere on the battlefield they fought for an hour they fought for two hours here they fought on the night of july 2nd we've already covered that and then on the morning of july 3rd for seven let me get it right seven hours okay and to talk more about that fighting and to hopefully have a little wow moment for one of our guests and before we show you some more cool objects from the battle of gettysburg uh let's bring on chris white here who's gonna hand the camera off to annaleigh all right thanks gary and we do hope that you checked out our other uh july second call still video we do talk about the fighting on the third here at gettysburg um as well but just to talk a little bit about what's going on let's go from what i always call the 50 000 to the 500. on the evening of july 2nd the division or at least three quarters of the division of edward allegheny johnson attacks culps hill it's held by about 1400 new yorkers under the command of george sears green green will be here throughout the battle those men will shift around a little bit green's a very interesting man to make a long story short uh he's from rhode island born in 1801 he will go off to west point where he graduates with lorenzo thomas and he'll graduate with a guy named hannibal day who fights over in the wheat field and then he is going to go stay in the army tragically he'll lose his wife and his three children to disease while he's in the army leave the army eventually gets remarried and then has a number of uh of children they'll have one daughter who helps take care of him uh throughout his life uh but she's also uh related to hannibal day his classmate here at gettysburg who's fighting here gettysburg because that's her father-in-law she marries into the day family then he will have a son uh you may have uh be familiar with the uss monitor uh and a lieutenant greene who's on that ship and that will be his son who becomes the executive officer of the monitor and takes over during the battle in march of 1862 another one of his sons will be here on culp's hill with him and be one of his aides and serve up through 1864 when he's wounded and leaves the service his last uh son will actually go to west point graduate in 1870 go on to serve uh in the army in and out of the army uh will go on to be an observer of the russo-turkish war he'll figure out to take up cobblestone streets in new york and uh pave flats but ironically he is during the spanish-american war thomas green is going to serve under a confederate general named fitzhugh lee lee will enter united states service and serve during the spanish-american war so green has a long lineage with his second family as it were and green served up here on july 2nd and third so that's just one of our soldier stories that we have from up here but to get you oriented to where we are from the 50 000 down to the 500 very quickly on the evening of july 2nd johnson attacked the hill the hill is going to remain in union hands now robert e lee on the morning of july 3 decides that he is going to renew his attacks his first attack will take place here at culps hill he will attack again down where we were at devil's den the wheat field and little round top he wants james long street to renew his attack now longstreet feels that his men is 14 000 or so men which are now depleted down to about 8 000 or so are too worn out and does not attack but on this side of the confederate line on the east side of gettysburg we'll have richard yule old dick yule one leg you'll will be out here 47 years young virginia native he will be out here um and reinforcing the culps hill area the confederates on the evening of july 2nd came very close to capturing the baltimore pike which is the lifeline of george gordon mead's army george gordon mead has to defend two cities washington dc and baltimore maryland those are his orders and the direct route of communication and the direct road to baltimore is obviously the baltimore pike meet on the evening of july 2nd decides i'm going to stay and fight it out he's going to stay here at gettysburg and then reinforce this sector as ju as uh does robert e lee so this side of the battlefield will grow in size and shape more union 12 core troops will arrive here around midnight july 2nd to the 3rd and they'll look around us they'll look up on the lower culp hill where they have these nice fortifications and as they try to approach them they're getting shot at they think it might be some union soldiers it's not those are george maryland stewards north carolinians virginians and marylanders they don't get along very well so marilyn stewart is going to put the first maryland between his virginians and his north carolinians keep the kids separated that's what we'll do on on some of our battlefields so he will have men up there now the 12th corps will have to retake their trenches and in some of the land the american battlefield uh trust has helped to preserve over powers hill we'll have artillery who can fire over over to this area we'll also have an attack plane that'll be in behind us where unions wealth corps and six core troops will come up here and attack on july 3rd members of the trust are helping to preserve that land right now so we have all kinds of different things happening here so the union army will renew their attack we'll we'll attack clubs hill around 4 to 4 30 on the morning of july 3. let's flip to the confederate side very quickly what richard ewell is now supposed to do is try to take kob's hill and keep pushing in we think that there's a pressure applied to both sides of the union line that's not going to be the case but yule will go for broke he'll have men on the north side of the hill and that will be under uh the command of jon jones jones is actually wounded in the uh brigade i'm sorry in the action before and a guy named robert dungan will be in charge of his brigade going up to the top slope of of the kulps will be the 42nd virginia infantry with four dosses in that regiment and a shout out to richard chapman for reminding me of this desmond doss from hacksaw ridge fame has four uh four ancestors fighting here right on culp hill one thomas is killed in action on the morning of july third he also has some members of the 44th virginia which are also serving up in jon jones's brigade rum jones is his nickname john marshall jones because he likes to drink the next brigade coming down in line will be frank nichols brigade commanded by jesse williams frank nichols is going to lose a foot and eye and a and a arm during the during the war after the war he'll run for before an office of governorship of new orleans and his soldiers said we will vote for whatever's left of him williams his uh jesse williams will be leading nichols brigade up the hill that's the steepest part of culp's hill now we get down into the money section this area we're in the saddle this is where the confederates can make make headway because they said they needed scaling ladders to get up upper called silt now down through here we're going to see the brigades of junius daniel junius daniel be in behind us he fought on july 1st you heard about him in some of our earlier videos then we'll also have the brigade of george marilyn stewart his mix brigade they will be over in this this section then on the other side of him will be extra billy smith's small brigade extra billy smith eli he gets a nickname extra billy because he was skimming from the taxpayers but billy smith brigade's down in that area near spangler spring and then up into this area we will have a brigade that was left out on july 2nd july 2nd if you watched our last video you found out that allegania johnson came up one brigade short because there was some pesky union horsemen out on a place called breaker hops ridge and he had to leave one brigade the famed stonewall brigade out in that sector on the morning of july the third a portion four regiments of the five stonewall brigade regiments commanded by james walker nicknamed stonewall jim because he challenged stonewall jackson to a duel hates stonewall jackson my kind of man comes right up through here they come right up through here and that will include every regiment of the uh of the uh stonewall brigade the 27th the 33rd virginia the fourth and fifth virginia except for the second the second famously has wesley culps in in its ranks and they're fighting over on the zephyrum tawny farm at this point on the morning of july third is kulp dead at this point we don't know there's a lot of speculation he could have been killed on the second he could have been killed on the third a lot of speculation with that so this is what we're starting to see here we have a mass amount of troops coming up here we even have some alabamians under the command of edward o'neill who didn't do very well on the first day check out that video but this is what yule is now going to do on the evening of july 1st he said man we can't attack on my my side of the field now on the morning of july the 3rd robert e lee says tough reinforce and attack cult hill seven hours of fighting more than 200 000 rounds of ammunition will be expended by john white gary's division alone this is going to be a very tough battle and the confederates are going to have a tough nut to crack good and if i may real quick first of all i'm already seeing some hashtags for um you know chris said that there was an attack plane that's not what he meant he means plane spelled in a different way two um let me just say that you know this is the story of the battle of gettysburg we keep seeing you know the confederates made some gains and they brought three more brigades to this fight on july 3rd but the union got their five brigades back plus four more for good measure that's what the confederates are fighting facing at gettysburg and let me reintroduce our friend ancestry anne here and mitchell family historian ancestry who made specific shirts just for this purpose check it out ancestry fold three t-shirts with the gettysburg battlefield and the troop lines on them and you just heard from chris that right there your ancestor was charging up cult's hill reaction and who was he if you know uh these would be the donald's the donald's this would be john and um benjamin donald they were they lived um in lexington virginia they were born there one of them died they're the other one well we'll get to him in a second they uh signed up for the 27th you know the 27th virginia you know what they went through but here it sounds like that's amazing they both survived the war but they spent at the last year of it at camp chase john went back to lexington he ended up drowning in the buffalo river benjamin was court-martialed at one point we don't know why because all those records had been burned in richmond but he moved out to texas and he was murdered he was shot dead in the street he was the troublemaker that's all we know but to know that this is where they were i mean how does anybody come out of this and be the same it's just not possible it is i'm having another chill moment gary good i'm glad because i can almost see i hope you can too maybe you can almost see some of the movements over here and and that's why it's important that this ground has been cleared and i want to just do one more thing impromptu because we got to get moving again but just real quick i mean you're not the first person to do research at your place of business it happens to be and find maybe something you don't want to find you know your ancestor ran away was a thief wasn't married when he or she said they were do you experience that a lot of ancestry we experience that all the time at ancestry i mean sometimes i have i find slave owners in my family i find all sorts of difficult things people maybe they deserted the war maybe they committed crimes maybe they were wonderful people but what i usually find people aren't black and white they aren't good they aren't bad they're flawed just like we all are and you just take them as who they were you look at the times that they lived in and these were the times these men lived in and you can't judge them you can only learn about their lives and make sure that those stories are told because it takes seven generations for all that stuff to flow down to you and it will have an effect on you whether the words are ever spoken or whether the stories are ever spoken here here if we could ever need anything now it's to not judge the people of the past too harshly in this environment we're in right now and they're not perfect and neither are you uh chris i think we're gonna walk up top now is that correct yeah i'm gonna grab the camera annalise and give it back here i'll do a quick walk and talk yeah out in this area the union soldiers talk about building earthen fortifications and we're coming up to a dip in those fortifications which are still here at least remnants of them and they've been improved over the years but the union soldiers come out here they start clearing the trees uh that were out here you would have had hogs and cows keeping down the undergrowth so it would have been more of an open forest at the time and when they go into this open forest they find a wagon that had been abandoned out here it looked like it was a post wagon that would carry mail or telegraphs or things like that and don't know if it came here because the confederate showed up or because someone had you know ditched it out here prior to the battle for another reason but they do find that and this is the area where george stewart's men on the evening of july 2nd uh will come up into an attack the 137th new york would be actually facing part of the 137th new york as you're looking ahead you see john white gary and his monument gary's one of six future governors of pennsylvania who served in the civil war uh three of them have ties here to gettysburg um james beaver samuel pennypacker and then john white gary uh and as we come up here this would have been a fortification known as a traverse and this traverse would have been very important this is where um the 137th new york fell back to this will be a defensive line and then as we look up we'll see different units here the 7th ohio the 137th new york uh the 140 ninth new york which was commanded by henry barnum who was commanded who was wounded at malvern hill and he will actually name his kid malvern hill barnum after the place where he was wounded so there's all kinds of stories here on culp hill if you haven't got out here before you need to come over to kulpsil all right good thanks so much chris i know he's handing the camera back again we're going to i think seek out our friend our good friend carol reardon gettysburg foundation gettysburg college and of course expert on all things everything and she always said there she is how shy she is as well we get along really well dr carol reardon hi there welcome back so you've been down in the valley between lower culps hill and upper cult's hill and i remember a time when when i first started coming down here when there was just a cult cell and we didn't really differentiate between upper and lower very much thanks to harry fonz and his important books on the fighting here we've gotten a lot more comfortable with differentiating between upper culps hill and lower culps hill most of the attention and especially a lot of the clearing has been done on upper culp's hill and that's a wonderful thing for all of us who try to interpret the past and try to preserve these battlefields in as much of an 1863 way as we can this this is just awesome but of course i'm the one who always finds that small little piece that needs a little bit more attention and so i've been paying a little bit more attention to lower culture i'm suspecting that a lot of you who have come here have spent a lot less time here than you have on little round top or the field of pickett's charge or something like that and part of that reason is because pick here on cop still it's awfully difficult to figure out who's doing what the whom and when well there's fighting here on july late on july 2nd and then on early morning almost till noon on july 3rd and the fights those two different fights aren't always between the same troops each time there's different players different ways and if you come here and you see the great profusion of monuments around here it's really difficult to differentiate whether they're talking about july 2nd july 3rd and what part of july 3rd they mean so it gets very confusing but tell you what it's to your great uh benefit it's to your great advantage to take the time to sit down and try to figure out what's july 2nd and what's july 3rd here's a recommendation next time you come when you want to think about july 2nd come in on east confederate and make one whole loop around here just focusing on july 2nd and go through the confederate main line at the bottom of the hill and figure out in your mind work it out in your mind what part of this was july 2nd when you come back to do it on july 3rd come in from the baltimore pike go down through spangler spring and come up here again and if you do it two different ways sometimes you can figure out exactly what's going on now you know oftentimes when i show up on the screen there's a soldier's story i want to tell you and because we pay so much attention to upperculture i want to tell you the story about a private who fought uh down on lower culture there's nothing special about him he is every man uh he is but that's probably one of the reasons why i like him if i wasn't telling you about him today it is entirely possible you would never hurt hear about private william c paul he's from the area around hillsborough north carolina an area that was not strongly in favor of secession but on july 20th 1861 18 year old william paul enlisted in a company in a company that became company d of the first north carolina infantry he was not always physically strong enough to stay out in the field there were a few times that he had to go on sick leave but he returned to the ranks uh probably earlier than he should participate in the pennsylvania campaign with his comrades and arms what he did on this day is a little bit buried in mystery as so many things are on this battlefield uh where is his regiment going to be well it's going to be down on lower culps hill the part that i like to pay attention to right now when we talk about lower cults hill we tend to focus on the maryland confederates who are here they they're such an unusual story in themselves but on the to the right flank of the marylanders was the third north carolina infantry and on their left flank was the first and william paul is with the first north carolina so either on the night of the second or early on the third private paul in company d of the first north carolina came up with slopes attacking in this direction up on lower culps hill he was hit by some kind of a projectile in the abdomen apparently it was not a penetrating wound it was more of a scrape they didn't see it as something that was immediately fatal or anything like that my sense is that it probably that he probably got wounded fairly early in the action because he was able to be removed from the battlefield and taken to the hospital of stewart's brigade uh it was on on martin sheila's farm it's back behind confederate lines there he will be taken prisoner after the union army leaves here and the provost guard takes over all the confederate hospitals uh private paul will become a prisoner of war whatever kind of injury he had suffered became infected and on the 24th of july private paul will die he'll be buried uh underneath a fruit tree his grave was marked and in 1872 when the southern women's groups paid to have southern graves uh this and southern remains disinterred and taken back south uh he was still in a recognized grave we know that his remains were put into specific specific boxes that were then taken down and reburied down in hollywood hollywood cemetery down in richmond so we we actually know a good deal about what happened to him here and it's a story very much like uh that others went through well it's going to take a while for the for for this news to get back to hillsboro all his family would have known was that he was wounded and left in pennsylvania when lee's army returned to virginia imagine trying to find out what had happened we don't know how he how his family found out that he had that what what happened um but the obituary was published in the hillsborough north carolina newspaper on september 9th so somehow some way took a couple of months but the word got back it's one of those obituaries that's kind of typical for its age it's not just simply one or two lines it really addresses the character so that his neighbors and friends can appreciate the the full nature of the loss here it's not just a number on a ledger it was a real person they pointed out that when the call was first made for volunteers william paul was among the first to respond to that call he was a youth of great integrity and purity of character his physical endurance was wonderful he had gone through marches endured exposure suffered hardship and all without under uttering a complaining world word always bright and cheerful prompt in the discharge of duty fearless on the field of battle and high-toned and honorable in all his relations with men and officers uh his his comrades in arms genuinely regretted his loss there was always either some biblical quotation or some kind of a quotation it seemed that would sum up what had happened and and here it said death it is said ever selects a shining mark and just in a very small obituary and this is what an obituary would look like in a civil war newspaper more than one column you can see that it's pretty much put out there for all the neighbors to see and you can see a lot of these newspapers by taking a look at the oh you know using uh our friends from ancestry and fold three and and some of these other uh partners with us this weekend you can go back and you can find some of these things as well private paul is one of many uh confederate casualties on this hill for years and years this was always the part of the battlefield that people didn't make time to if you only had a short amount of time this is the part that you uh you skipped over don't skip it over next time you're here make a point of coming here come here on more than one occasion follow the second day route follow the third day route approach it from different directions take advantage of the wonderful changes that have happened up here on the hill to reopen up the terrain and just like me today goes by and i don't learn something new about gettysburg i'm not doing my job i give you the same challenge so you get out there and do the same thing here comes chris now carol that was awesome we appreciate it i'm glad she brought up hillsboro north carolina we were just down there gary and myself um talking about a lot of our revolutionary war items to go on at guilford courthouse uh the pre-revolution at alamance so check out all those videos over on our youtube channel and on our facebook page and you know she's bringing up some really great items here for us to talk about and we're standing beside the seventh ohio infantry so i'm going to bring dave maughey david maugie back on here to talk a little bit about the 7th ohio a little uh he has something i don't know what he has but they're going to surprise me with it but the 7th ohio just to show you their monument very quickly we're standing beside the ohio monument one of the things they think of with the 12th corps here is that they are a western unit because they have the third wisconsin the 27th indiana which is some of the tallest men in the entire union army they're giants and then you have the fifth ohio seventh ohio you have the 29th the the 66th ohio so you have a lot of different ohio regiments out here so they think that they're western but the seventh ohio if you've checked out our videos when gary and i went to kentucky and west virginia you would have heard a lot about the seventh ohio at the battle of kessler's cross lanes which is in the uh the gauley river valley when we go out that way into west virginia we shot that video with you in the pouring down rain but the seventh ohio starts off as a three-month regiment and then converts to a three-year regiment their colonel is from pittsburgh where i'm from but ends up going up to uh to cleveland and becomes a printer and one of the cleveland newspapers his name is william crichton creighton is uh well regarded with his men he fights well at kessler's cross lanes even though they were driven off at overwhelming losses the unit will go on to uh be merged with the army of the potomac in the week before the battle of antietam and they will join the the newly formed 12th corps they'll fight at antietam they'll come here to gettysburg then they'll head out west and they'll fight at places like uh lookout mountain ring gold which is just devastating to these men and william creighton it has said before he goes into every battle is going to crow like a rooster when he'll get up and either flap his arms and crow like a rooster it shows up in their regimental history uh so it's their his way to get his men up and fighting in fact annalise if we walk this way you will see on the back side of their monument a rooster so there's the the rooster that even made it onto the monument here at um and carol was playing rooster for us so there you go gary can be happy i did it for him chris is kind of doing it right now too maybe we'll close this video with everybody everybody's doing it you hear that yeah so so they're going to be up here uh on july 3rd uh now the 12th core throughout the battle is going to move around a lot they're going to end up over on benner's hill they'll end up on powers hill they'll end up down at little round top uh they'll be on culp seal lower club so they're all over the place they're called all over the field and the 7th ohio will be moving up and down this hill just like a lot of folks they'll move into the trenches off to my right fire fire fire and then fall back on the other side of a small hillock where they'll clean their weapons replenish their ammunition and a new regiment would come up fire fire fire and then they would just keep this cat and mouse game up throughout the day that's how we keep up a constant stream of fire but that's the seventh ohio a veteran regiment out here by 1863 and i know david has something to show us and i want you to stick close by chris because i understand that you love this regiment and that you're going to love this artifact and by the way david moggy on the board of the gettysburg foundation passed interim president all right so uh chris talked a little bit about uh uh colonel crichton and his actions uh leading the his roosters as he called his men into battle they were known as the rooster regiment it was pretty well known these antics that not only crichton but i think some of his other officers officers sometimes did as well and actually i want to read to you uh before i show this artifact uh on account of uh william creighton's death on november 27th at the battle of ringgold and this is uh by a witness and this is what what this witness says his regiment was called the rooster regiment they all wore a silver badge of a rooster on their coat lapels and whenever they went into a fight the colonel would flap his arms and crow like a rooster and the boys would also crow that ringgold the colonel had just purchased an elegant uniform and he looked fine while leading our brigade that is candy's in action he was near his old regiment when the colonel and lieutenant colonel crane of the seventh ohio both got up on a rock flap their arms and crowed and this was the occasion which william crichton on which william crichton was killed uh it mentions that the regiment wore silver lapel pins and in fact i have a uh chris a silver lapel pin a rooster pin that was found right here at gettysburg on the line of 7th ohio many many years ago you can see the silver just leaking through a little bit uh let's get a little bit closer i've seen these in books i've never seen one in person they're extremely rare and i'm told uh by other collectors that indeed this is uh this is something that is the most one of the most sought after badges yeah uh of the civil war era so that is the rooster badge i want you to hold it for a little while good chris while i move on to a couple other artifacts can i ask you one question about crane and creighton which i believe they would be a great buddy movie there are so many good buddy movies that could come out of the civil war but what i want to know is i heard the story that crane was shot killed first at ringgold and then creighton yes i got him right creighton went to retrieve the body and then that is when he was shot and killed is that true i'm asking that's what i've heard as well i don't know if it's true true or not but that is definitely what was passed down and don't you think they'd make a great buddy movie i think it would the two of them are just characters i could see like a sitcom music yeah right so just real quick uh you know before we move on we have a little bit more on the seventh ohio real quick if you don't mind david and um and i just want to say that if you like the seventh ohio if i'm correct go back to our video on kessler's cross lanes is that where someone may have already promoted that on this video oh he did and i was walking away sure okay well i won't get into that okay my apologies in any case uh there is a soldier named charles carroll who's fighting here in the seventh ohio and seventh ohio saw some casualties but they only saw one person killed and one person mortally wounded uh ann i want to tell you the story of charles carroll and i think this is a just emblematic story of the loss not just on the field but the loss at home charles carroll was married he had four children well he had three children he had his son charles sun will willard and his son james monroe in march of 1863 his son willard passes away as we know or maybe you don't charles carroll came here with the seventh ohio he was fighting he was shot and killed on july third so we know that we have his records we have his wife's pension widow widow's pension sorry it's hot out here i'm getting my words turned around but then four days later july 7th his youngest child a daughter is born it's his only daughter and she was born four days later a few months later one of his sons dies james monroe there are only two children left martha his wife is left with two children and all that grief in 1863 can you imagine this is the cost of the civil war it's not just out here on the field it's not the blood and the carnage and all of that it's the broken hearts and broken homes at home and the lives that just changed forever because of the moment that happens out here on the field that's great and that's one of the reasons we're so happy to have all of our guests here because we can tell a more complete story with the objects and with the genealogy and whatnot and you know enough of you know even though the tragic death of of charles enough of his kids lived so that there was one of his descendants uh paul stewart button and then his children and great-grandchildren told the story of charles carroll i want to thank the trust friend walt for bringing this story to our attention in the first place um and with the note that you have helped you all our supporters have helped us to save a good deal of land around cultural on wolf's hill along the baltimore pike and really at the base of culps hill right now is our current effort um let me turn it back over to chris or david whoever wants it okay uh thanks gary so i've got just a couple more artifacts related to the fighting at culp's hill and i'm gonna i guess uh jeremy once you come up or chris one or one of the other just uh just uh this is really stable so if you want to just hold this and show our viewers uh this is a very rare artifact picked up off the battlefield here on kob's hill immediately following the battle it's an 1858 pattern state purchased militia cartridge box it has a beautiful maryland state seal box plate it also has the russet pre-war strap there were a couple of there were two to three thousand marylanders on the field at gettysburg there are a couple of well-known regiments that went head-to-head here on culps hill on july 2nd the first maryland eastern shore which was a u.s regiment volunteer regiment and then also the first battalion maryland battalion csa which we know from their monuments today is the second maryland i like to think that this cartridge box which is unidentified to a particular individual was a witness to that fighting on july 2nd where famously grace graced the the the dog the mascot of the first maryland battalion uh was killed uh either way it represents to me a state that is torn uh by the american civil war much as anne was just talking about uh and how families were disrupted this state was disrupted i want to read to you um a a uh excerpt from uh the writings of colonel james wallace of the union first maryland he wrote that the first maryland confederate regiment met us and were cut to pieces we sorrowfully gathered up many of our old friends and acquaintances and had them carefully and tenderly cared for included among the dead was the battalion's mascot a dog named grace and we've talked a little bit about that but this is a very rare artifact it's in great shape chris is there anything you'd like to say about it um particularly yeah what's great about these the cartridge box here the the plates actually have a purpose so whenever you get a new cartridge box whenever you open this up this leather is not going to be worked well with so it's going to kind of flop open so we're going to identify soldiers with this and it'll be an identification for units you know we have the generic cs or us but these are weighted lead normally what they will do is actually when you open up your cartridge box that lead will or this lighted weighted lead will close the cartridge box meaning that it will keep it closed from flames coming over top of your shoulder when you discharge a black powder musket so they actually serve a practical purpose you can strap it closed down here you can see that the leather has given way a little bit but we we have the ball that you could put it put it onto we have a second interior uh interior box lid that's again to help protect what's inside the box here we can hold this is for our sergeants tool or anything else we need to have in here cleaning patches or whatnot this would actually be very very heavy to wear on the on the strap itself you're going to see two holes these two holes were actually showing me that there was once a breast plate on here because they would have these small eye hooks on the back you would cut this through with this with a small knife you would then uh put the breast plate on here this is the side the breast plate would have been on i could see where the lead once was and on the back um i'm sorry we have it on the uh i have it reversed here's where we have it you can see it there on the back i can see this is where they actually tied it together they would have probably used um leather or something else you can see the impression because this will be so tight on there that we've actually made a small impression here and that is what would hold on the breastplate at this point so on the back side here you can actually see the circle of the old lead that was on here and on this side so at one point this was actually switched around it was reversed so the black should have been out the brown is now out and if you've ever put one of these together if you're a reenactor putting these these straps on here is a real pain in the butt uh because you're usually working with leather that has not been well worked with yet so it can take a little bit and you can see how they're crossed in the back doing it the proper way is really a pain but but it's an awesome awesome artifact yeah and it leads me to believe chris i don't know what your thoughts are that this may have been worn by a confederate soldier because the eagle breast plate would have been taken off a lot of people didn't like those because it was a perfect target area about to fall off the mound here hope you and viewers enjoyed that um so you know who knows but it's a great artifact and certainly a witness to the fighting here on cobb sill then i have one one last artifact which is uh very rusted out uh apparently it looks like a cavalry saber uh i'm told and i'm not an expert in this so i'm gonna defer to chris that this started life as uh and you can't see the blade because it's it's it's uh stuck in the scab and rust in the scabbard but it started life as an 1840 artillery saber and then uh was later reworked by a confederate arsenal to put on a model 1860 light cavalry hilt which indicates that it may have changed hands and then was again reworked by a confederate arsenal it was all this also appears to have been a projectile struck not very hard but enough to bend uh the the uh scabbard a little bit this was actually uh ended up just ended up in rock creek at the base of an old log footbridge that would lead over to wolf hill and uh it ended up in the collection of a gentleman named uh john geiselman who's a kind of a legend in gettysburg he had a collection that he started as a little boy he was for 50 years a janitor at gettysburg high school and yet he turned out to be one of the great collectors of the modern era he died actually on 9 11 2001 and his collection came into the into onto the market he would always identify his artifacts with a little round circle in white a sticker a sticky sticker with a number on it so this came straight out of the geiselmann collection and more than anything just represents an artifact that didn't get picked up after the fighting was over and a fellow named charles cook a local resident actually eyeballed this while crossing that log bridge over rock creek unfortunately i don't know exactly when it was but it must not have been you know i'm i'm guessing within 20 or 30 years after the battle who knows uh at any rate it's just an artifact of the fighting it's by the way it is uh it's tempting to think that there were artillery units or cavalry units here but it certainly quite uh often infantry officers including thomas livermore the of the fifth new hampshire um would actually uh uh utilize cavalry sabres or uh specifically cavalry savers as a side sidearm so um anyway just a interesting artifact from kulpsil and uh thank you for giving me the opportunity to share it awesome all right this is uh what we would have been nicknamed a wrist breaker because it's so heavy um and this is actually uh coming off of what david said this is what francis barlow would carry so if you ever saw francis barlow little wafe of a man he has this massive sword and he would use the flat of the sword to hit men on their backsides or other places like that um to see it reworked is is really cool uh as soon as i saw it i said that's 1840 but man they have a wood handle on this one um that's intricately carved here you can see it's worn over time and it's not uncommon to have the bottoms of these these dented four because of projectiles or because these hang so low they will bump into everything these are a pain to wear as an officer uh so you would find these but this one actually looks like just from the way it's hit is it's a projectile it would have hit but to chris's point if if you find a cavalry saver that's been used in service typically you will find a a man-made dent here which literally held the saber in place so when they rode along it wouldn't bounce up and down and make a lot of noise was i incorrect chris that this is a 1860 uh uh adder to to it was is this is this it looks 1840 to me but i i i can't say 100 without looking at some of my welcome to the antiques roadshow yeah so uh i think that's our cue to get off screen and move on so on the market it would fetch good what i want to say is first of all unbelievable unbelievable artifacts unbelievable stories thanks so much to david and to carol and chris you're adding so much i mean could you imagine i swear chris had no idea which artifacts we were pulling out until they were handed to him or still he started talking about them and i just can't say enough how proud we are at the trust to have you know someone with so much knowledge about all that anything else to add chris no come to culp's hill we love kulps hill we love comps hill um you know are are you going out or are you taking it out oh because i would love it if we could come over and just check out some of these earthworks just so you know you know there are the actual remnants that were of the earthworks dug by george sears green's men and maybe improved by others um you know and you're looking at it it doesn't look like much but maybe chris will take us out with a moment of zen and you can see more from going up the hill thank you so much for watching and thank you so much for supporting battlefield preservation you

Channel: American Battlefield Trust

Views: 20,218

Rating: 4.9576159 out of 5

Keywords: American Battlefield Trust, Civil War Trust, 158th anniversary of gettysburg, culp's hill video tour, gettysburg video tour, gettysburg day 3 tour

Id: hff9eAoZ3kA

Length: 41min 36sec (2496 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 03 2021