Dan Sickles Did A Bad Job At The Battle Of Gettysburg

Day 2 of the Battle of Gettysburg is all about how much Dan Sickles sucks. 

First of all, he was a child molester, marrying a 15-year-old child when he himself was 32 years old.

Then a few years later, he murdered that wife's affair partner, Philip Barton Key II, who also happened to be the adult son of Francis Scott Key (Key was also several years older than Teresa, the wife, who was still only 21 or 22 years old by this time). And mind you, this is after Sickles himself got so involved with a sex worker that he took the sex worker with him on vacation to England, where he also TOOK HER TO MEET QUEEN VICTORIA. 

What. An. Asshole.

Anyway, after the affairs on both sides, after the murder, after the trial during which he becomes the first person in the United States to use the temporary insanity defense, the Civil War starts, and Sickles, who'd low-key been a militiaman since the 1850s, became more active--having one's boots on the ground was a good way to repair one's dodgy political reputation! He always seemed to have some reason out of his control to keep him out of many of the actual battles (ahem), but he did do a cool thing in that whenever freedom seekers found his camp, he'd assist them, get them jobs and military training and stuff. So that was good, but overall, he was still an asshole.

Okay, so on the morning of July 2, Major General Meade--you know, the guy who was in charge of the ENTIRE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC?!?--told Sickles to anchor the very leftmost flank of the army in a very specific spot. Remember how the Union had ended the night before on top of Cemetery Hill and Culp's Hill? On this day, Meade wanted to line up against the Confederates in a sort of upside down fishhook shape south of the town, everyone facing outward. Culp's Hill was the right flank, with forces extending a little bit south along that hill. From Culp's Hill forces were stationed west to a little past Cemetery Hill, then south along a ridgeline, Cemetery Ridge, to just north of Little Roundtop. Meade told Sickles to hold that that specific spot just north of Little Round Top.

In the below screenshot you can see Cemetery Ridge topographically, although I think the forces were actually mostly stationed just to its west. Sickles was basically supposed to hold the line south from about the "Chubby's" to the "Monument" straight north, with other guys to help him out north of that and Little Round Top to block the way through south of that. Sickles held that spot for a little bit, but then he decided that he personally liked the Peach Orchard better, so he gave the order and marched his entire corps away from where they were supposed to be, moving them forward nearly a mile and causing a huge, obvious gap in the line.

Meanwhile, this guy, Brigadier General Warren--

--was doing exactly what his statue depicts: standing on top of Little Round Top with binoculars, checking out the battlefield. Facing the northwest, he didn't see Sickles' corps at the base of Little Round Top, where they were supposed to be, but waaaaaay out there in that green field you can see a little sliver of behind the trees:

Mr. Craft Knife and Gouverneur Warren do not understand why Sickles' corps is so far away from their post!

Even worse, though, was that when he looked to the southwest, he saw glints of light and realized that they came from the bayonets of Confederate soldiers, who he realized could easily just march northeast, straight past Sickles' corps, and over Little Round Top to get right through the Union line. This view to the southwest shows their super easy path. Devil's Den, which will be important in a minute, is to the right:

Warren is trying to point out the danger to me, but I'm looking in the wrong direction entirely!

Warren basically ran immediately to go tell Meade, who then immediately went to check on the situation, but by then it was too late to get Sickles' troops back into their proper spot, because the Confederates started attacking. 

A messenger was sent to ask for reinforcements from one specific division, but before the messenger reached that division he ran into a completely different brigade commander, and when that commander heard the message, he took it upon himself to run his own four regiments up to Little Round Top, and it's those four regiments who saved the situation.

Some of the Confederate forces tried to fight their way up the west side of Little Round Top--

--but it's super rocky and exposed, AND uphill, and some of these soldiers had already been marching 20 miles that day. Earlier, they'd stopped for a rest and because they were out of water, a few guys gathered up everyone's canteens and made a quick run to the nearby creek to fill them. But while the guys were gone, they got orders to move out, and the canteen carriers still hadn't caught up with them. So they mostly got shot down like dogs, dehydrated and exhausted, on the western slope of Little Round Top.

Some other Confederate forces instead tried to go up and over Round Top so they could sneak up Little Round Top from the south, but they were met by the 20th Maine, commanded by Chamberlain, who had been told to hold this left flank of the Union army at all costs with his 385 soldiers.

This monument marks the left flank of the entire Union army.

There were so few soldiers to hold the entire southern edge of Little Round Top that they stretched out side by side in a single file instead of in their tidy Napoleonic rows, then, when they started to run out of ammunition, they fixed their bayonets and charged down Little Round Top in a counterattack of hand-to-hand fighting, as depicted in this Ghost of Paul Revere song:

Meanwhile, Sickles' guys were now the leading edge of this entire attack since they were so far in front of everyone else, so they ended up getting super spread out trying to keep Confederates from getting around them. Their line, which had just been meant to cover between the northern edge of Little Round Top to the southern edge of the Second Corp, now straggled from the Peach Orchard southeast to the Wheatfield, then due south to Devil's Den. All three spots had some of the bloodiest fighting of the battle, thanks to Sickles.

We skipped the Wheatfield and Peach Orchard, but we were curious about Devil's Den--so rocky!--so we stopped there to have a little snoopy around:

Full disclosure: somehow during this specific hike, Mr. Craft Knife must have walked through a nest of ticks or something, because he got about 1,000 ticks on him! Even the next morning, we checked out of the hotel and hopped into the car, ready to grab breakfast and the little kid and then book it back to Ohio for the big kid's graduation, and as I slid into the passenger seat I saw yet another tick clinging to the ceiling over the driver's seat, ready to drop onto his head.

So, if you go to Devil's Den, wear lots of permethrin and be careful not to brush against the greenery!

This is the view from the top of Devil's Den towards the eastern side of Little Round Top. You can't really see it in this photo, but if you zoom in about a thousand percent on my original photo, you can see a really cool monument to the 40th New York Infantry, with a soldier holding a rifle hiding behind the stone plaque and peeking over at you where you stand on top of Devil's Den. The 40th New York Infantry commander's official report is here, and when he gets to 4:00 he starts describing this attack.

This is the view a little to the south of the previous photo. The wooded area is Round Top, and the Confederates who met Chamberlain's force came through those woods, down into the little valley between Round Top and Little Round Top, and up into the woods you can see on the south side of Little Round Top. And then Chamberlain's soldiers ran them down with bayonets.

And here's me in the middle of Devil's Den itself, somehow not crouching in a nest of ticks!

The foreground of this photo looks alarmingly brushy, however, so now I'm wondering if Mr. Craft Knife did in fact sacrifice his health to get this perfect shot of me...

Devil's Den kind of feels like both a terrible and a wonderful place to fight. I have a couple of friends who are into Airsoft, and I bet if someone ever made an Airsoft arena that recreates this space, they would be booked solid at any admission price. You probably couldn't recreate via Airsoft the Union cannons on the west side of this hill, aimed to repel the first Confederate wave, or the Confederate sharpshooters on the east side, stationed after they'd taken the hill to snipe Union officers on Little Round Top.

Looking down at the Slaughter Pen area, probably already with his 1,000 ticks along for the ride.

By the end of July 2, the Union held Little Round Top and the Confederates held Devil's Den. The Union used cannons set up on Little Round Top to fire at Confederate forces to the north during the next day's battle, and Confederate snipers continued to pick off Union soldiers as they could find them from their nests on Devil's Den. 

But Sickles wouldn't be there to see that, because earlier on this day, a cannonball damaged his leg so badly that it had to be amputated. But that limb, at least, wouldn't be tossed outside through a broken window to land in a big pile of amputated limbs in some poor farmer's yard; Sickles, like the absolute psychopath that he was, kept his amputated leg, had the flesh removed, and then donated it to a museum--where it is still on exhibit!

While that was happening, though, further north along Cemetery Ridge was also seeing major fighting. Sickles' forces who had spread out along the Peach Orchard were falling back towards Cemetery Ridge, which means that the Confederates chasing them were now causing Cemetery Ridge to be attacked not just from the west, but also from the southwest. Soldiers, especially ones using tactics last relevant during the Napoleonic Wars, don't do as well when they're attacked on two fronts.

I wanted to take a photo towards the west, where the Confederate line would have been, but I'm not quite oriented correctly. If you want to know where the enemy was, you should always look where the cannons are pointed!

But this was also basically the center of the Union line (the next day's Pickett's Charge, also meant to break the center of the Union line, is just to the north of this spot), so breaking through here would give a huge boost to the Confederate forces. Individual Union artillery and infantry units suffered shocking casualty rates--out of the 262 soldiers of the 1st Minnesota infantry, 47 survived their charge toward the Confederate line here that was solely intended to buy time for more Union reinforcements to arrive--but the Union forces managed to hold Cemetery Ridge, which put everything in motion for a new Confederate push against the center of the Union line on the next, final day of the battle.

Caught my guy reading from our Bible, A Field Guide to Gettysburg, in exactly one photo, even though this book was in someone's hand constantly. It orients you to exactly where to face at each spot--at Little Round Top, it described actual specific rocks, and they were right where the book said they would be!--and then tells you exactly what happened there, what you could see at the time and what it looks like now, how it contributed to the battle and the war as a whole, etc. I swear that this trip would have been nearly meaningless without it.

Sickles spent the rest of his life trying to sully Meade's reputation and insisting that he'd been right and Meade had been wrong about the best spot for his troops to be that day--never mind that he'd defied a direct order and fucked up the whole battle plan. Meade was definitely right, though. If Sickles had held the line and not stretched his forces out at an angle in front of everyone else, the Confederate forces would have come up against a better established line with more manpower and gunpower. Although it's definitely possible that if it had been Sickles, and not Chamberlain, on the southern face of Little Round Top, he'd have done a bad job and the Confederates would have ended up taking it, and then there would have been no Union artillery to attack the right flank of the big Confederate charge the next day.

Which is where we're going next!

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Dinner in a Field Hospital, and All The Gettysburg Ghosts

 

Check out the balls found embedded in this tree from the Gettysburg battlefield, now on display in the Visitor Center at the Gettysburg National Military Park! Usually the tree grew over the places where a ball or bullet was embedded, and it's only discovered if it later has to be cut down and a saw hits it, so these are rare for how obvious they are.

We were told that it's also a mark of distinction (ahem) to own a Gettysburg house that has bullet marks, so the Farnsworth House, which Mr. Craft Knife and I saw while we killed time hoofing it around downtown before our evening ghost tour, must be a big winner!

All the white pockmarks are from bullets.

After sightseeing all the important spots from the first day of the battle, we ate dinner at Dobbin House, the oldest standing structure in Gettysburg, probable station on the Underground Railroad, and field hospital during the Battle of Gettysburg. Most of the rooms are fancy and require reservations, but you can dine as a walk-in in the basement springhouse, and it feels just as authentic with the decorations, wait staff in period clothing, candles on the table, and just general vibe of old-timey-ness:

I soaked up my Rum Bellies Vengeance, a cocktail so delicious that I just spent the last 45 minutes looking for a copycat recipe (maybe this one?), with an open-faced Reuben and some potato salad. 

I'm not really a ghost tour person, but in Gettysburg, at least during early May, which I was told is still considered the low season, they really roll up the sidewalks downtown after business hours, and I wanted to do *something* in the evening other than sit in my hotel room and watch hockey. I'd even have happily sat in a historic old bar and watched hockey, but those all closed early, too!

So a ghost tour it was!

I'd actually come very close to booking a ghost "hunt" instead, because those at least took place inside a genuine historic home of interest (and they let you hold an EMF detector!) and the weather forecast was looking miserable, but Mr. Craft Knife, who very rarely balks at any of my suggested plans, balked at this one. He said it would be too cornball, but maybe what he meant to say is that he would be too scared.

You know who else was scared?

Our ghost tour guide!

He 100% tried to dodge out of doing our tour, but to be fair to him, it actually had worked up to be quite a bit of a storm right before the tour was supposed to start. I'm normally not one to risk being struck by lightning, but the tour had said "rain or shine," I had on my six-buck poncho that I absolutely intended to return to Wal-mart afterwards (and I did!), and I wasn't dipping out of my tour without my money back, which this dude clearly had no authority to make happen. The other attendees obviously felt the same, considering that we all stood around him wearing our rain ponchos and remaining steadfastly neutral and non-responsive while he exclaimed at every lightning flash and talked about how he'd never seen weather like this before and wondered out loud if we should contact the company and ask for refunds.

Then he called his boss right in front of us to tell her it was storming very badly and he thought he should cancel, and I guess getting shot down while all his customers stood 1.5 feet away listening to the whole thing finally broke him, because after that he gave up and gave us our ghost tour.

And you'll never guess, but when he finally got going, it turns out that he could not stop talking about Gettysburg history and our 1-hour tour turned into at least 1.5 hours, lol.

Also, it was barely sprinkling by the time we got outside, so nobody was actually in (much) danger of being struck by lightning. And afterwards, we tipped him a LOT, so ultimately it was fine and maybe even a good lesson about being brave even when you're scared.

And his stories were VERY good! I wouldn't say that he told ghost stories, per se. He actually told stories from the battle with a lot of historical depth, and then at the end of each one he would sort of tack on some clearly memorized script about ghosts. Y'all already know from my homeschooling days that I am super into place-based learning as a way to enrich one's understanding through the sensory aspects of being present at a target location, and to build context through the physicality of geography, climate, etc., so this foot tour that involved walking down actual historic streets, standing outside each house while we learned about it, turning our heads to follow the tour guide's gestures pointing out the directions of soldiers here and sharpshooters there and field hospitals all around, was interesting and meaningful all on its own, since of course ghosts aren't real.

This is the Jennie Wade House--

--but it was actually her sister, Georgia, who lived there. Georgia had given birth right before the battle, so instead of evacuating she was sheltering in place on the first floor with her mother (the house was a duplex then, so I don't think they had access to the basement). In a brief break in the battle during the first day, Jennie ran over from the family home to shelter with them. She brought a couple more kids with her, so there they were, three women, one immediately post-partum, and three children, one of them a newborn, right in the middle of the fighting.

In the map below, you can see the Jennie Wade House Museum, where they were sheltering. Northwest is McPherson Farm, more north is Oak Ridge, across the street to the south is the hill with Evergreen Cemetery, and immediately to the southeast is Culp's Hill.

In the surrounding houses other citizens who hadn't evacuated cowered in the basements, while in other houses Confederate sharpshooters took over attics and field hospitals were hastily erected on first floors. Field medics performed surgeries and amputations on family dinner tables, and broke the glass out of the windows so they could more easily toss amputated limbs out into the yards. In a few yards, the occasional injured Union soldier lay in hiding, camouflaging themselves the best they could behind a refuse pile or under some of the rubble. Some of these soldiers were aided by Jennie, who frequently left shelter to bring them water from the well in Georgia's yard and bread that she baked in Georgia's kitchen. 

It was while she was standing in the kitchen, kneading dough for yet more loaves of bread, that Jennie was shot and killed. The official story is that it was a stray bullet of unknown provenance, but our tour guide made the excellent point that there were a few houses with Confederate snipers in their attics in sight of Georgia's house, including in the Farnsworth House, and the snipers would have seen Jennie going in and out and known that she was aiding Union soldiers. Alternatively, because the house was in such a clearly dangerous spot, a sniper could have easily assumed that anyone they saw puttering around in the yard or on the other side of a kitchen window obviously wouldn't be a civilian, because that would be CRAZY, and so might have thought that they were sniping an enemy soldier. ALTERNATIVELY alternatively, the house was literally in the middle of No Man's Land, so friendly fire could also have been a possibility.

Regardless, she was a badass and a war hero, and a flag flies over her grave, which is in Evergreen Cemetery just steps from where she died.

Yet another field hospital was located in this building:

Apparently, there really are a ton of people who claim to have experienced paranormal events in this building, and it is true that although it's a historical building in a high-value location, many restaurants have come and gone, with none seeming to be able to stick it out long-term. The most recent, The Hoof, Fin, and Fowl, actually just permanently closed earlier this year.

The national cemetery is on the other side of this house, whose main claim to fame is that fence, part of the same fence that surrounds the national cemetery and that originally came from Lafayette Square Park in Washington, D.C.:

The fence was procured by Civil War veteran and child molester Daniel Sickles, who did a stupid job during the Battle of Gettysburg (he got shot in the leg, had to have it amputated, and it's now in a museum!) but a great job with emancipation, who set up the Gettysburg National Military Park just beautifully but also embezzled a bunch of money, and who murdered Francis Scott Key's kid.

Okay, so the tour guide did tell one story that got to me, so much so that I didn't even take a photo of the house in question, the Gettysburg Orphanage. The orphanage was established after the battle, as a home for the orphaned children of Union soldiers, and during the time of its first headmistress, it was apparently excellent. But the second headmistress was a sadist who did terrible things to the children, so much so that the citizens of the town, who didn't even realize the true extent of her abuses, eventually figured out enough to raise an outcry that led to an investigation that led to her ouster.

Our tour guide said that people who visited the orphanage during ghost tours sometimes reported encountering the ghosts of the abused children, being touched by little hands or hearing cries or the whispers of little voices asking for help. So first of all, I think that it's gross to tell these awful, looky-looish stories about children, but I get that people have jobs and they've got to do them, and lord knows that my own job palpably makes the world a worse place, sigh, so setting that aside, how completely terrible it is to think that or pretend that abused children would not be at peace after death. Why on earth would you think or pretend that the soul(?) of a child is still actively suffering, and that you're going to go pay money to visit it, and that if it touches you and asks you to help it, you're just going to... what? Shiver and be scared and then later talk about it like it's an awesome story? Would you not want to pay all the money in the world to find every exorcist in the world to do whatever it is that exorcists do to send souls on to the afterlife?

I swear, I have never in my life been so grateful to be an atheist, because what the fuck is going on with these ghost-believers?!?

Anyway, the tour guide's story of how a townsperson's pigs got loose during the battle and ate a bunch of dead/dying soldiers was better.

And speaking of dead/dying soldiers... tomorrow, it's back to the battlefield!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

In Which John Burns Is My Favorite Old Coot Of Gettysburg

Let's go on a road trip!

Ohio has both a brand-new Wawa and a brand-new Buccees. Mr. Craft Knife and I tried the Buccees a few weeks prior when it was more crowded than Disneyland and I did NOT get the hype, but what with all our drives back and forth to Pennsylvania, I DO now get the Wawa hype!

I didn't ever tell you the story about how the kid and I messed up ordering at Wawa SOOOOO badly during our long-ago trip to see the college that would become her alma mater, because it is genuinely humiliating and the kid and I vowed never to speak of it again (while still almost constantly referring to it to each other, because we literally cannot process it, it was so embarrassing). But because of that, every time I visit a Wawa and its ordering kiosk has actual instructions, I always take a picture and get a little madder at the Independence Hall Wawa. I hate you, you guys! You exist in one of the biggest tourist spots in the country--WHY IS YOUR SPECIFIC ORDERING KIOSK SO NON-INTUITIVE?!? WHY ARE YOU SO HIGH-KEY RUDE ABOUT IT!!!

I once again managed to convince Mr. Craft Knife not only to come with me on this trip to pick our daughter up from college, but also to make a proper sightseeing trip of it, so I had someone to take pictures of me chatting with Lincoln at Gettysburg National Military Park!

Bro is soooo much taller than me--my feet barely even reach the ground in front of his favorite reading bench!

Also, he is the only person in the family patient enough to drive me wherever along the battlefield I want to go, hang out with me while I read every plaque, stand where I tell him to stand while I take photos of him in front of every significant (and insignificant) spot, and basically just do whatever I tell him to do while I am also being very, very, very boring about it.

I can remember the exact moment, approximately a decade ago, when I let a friend borrow my audio tour of Gettysburg on CD, but it's definitely too late to ask for it back now, ahem, so instead, Mr. Craft Knife and I relied on the NPS app for this first day of battlefield touring.

Here we are looking northwest towards the McPherson Farm:

On the morning of June 30, 1863, soldiers from the US cavalry and soldiers from the Confederate infantry were VERY surprised to discover each other on the road in front of McPherson's barn. In the image below, the road, Chambersburg Pike (because it runs from Chambersburg!) is the Hwy 30 just to the north of the McPherson Farm label, which marks McPherson's barn. My photos are taken from around the 1st Brigade 1st Division Cavalry Corps memorial.

This Confederate army, headed by Robert E. Lee, had sneaked past the US forces and into Pennsylvania, hoping to draw the US army out of the Confederate territories for the summer so that the Southern farmers could get a proper harvest for the first time since the war had begun, the better for the Confederates to steal it all later. He also hoped that putting battles in front of Northern faces would convince Northern politicians to press for peace, because who wants a battle right in front of their face (spoiler alert: definitely not the citizens of Gettysburg!)? He'd accomplished the sneaking part, and now he was stationed in Chambersburg, and his entire 75,000-person army was stretched in a big semi-circle over and around Gettysburg, busy pillaging and raiding and looting the countryside.

But the Union was chasing them north, just like Lee had wanted, except that Lee didn't know exactly where they were, because his cavalry, headed by Jeb Stuart, was also out and about, wandering around far from home base, and if Stuart sent Lee any communications about the location of Union troops, Lee didn't receive them.

The Union didn't know where the Confederate army was, either, but their 2,700-horse cavalry was nearby, trotting ahead of the army keeping their eyes open, and that's who spotted the Confederate infantry marching down Chambersburg Pike towards Gettysburg on June 30. The Confederates spotted them, too. 

And then both sets of forces literally noped out, lol! They both just reversed themselves right back where they came from and decided they'd deal with it tomorrow.

Which was July 1, 1863!

So, the morning of July 1, the Union cavalry had set up super early on Chambersburg Pike (the yellow road on the map), around the Herrs Ridge Road line (far left), keeping an eye out for the inevitable march of the infantry to show up from the west. When they spotted each other, that's when the Battle of Gettysburg began:

So, you've got 2,700 Union cavalry versus 10,000 Confederate infantry. Both sets of forces are basically just trying to hold off the other set until reinforcements arrive, but it's harder for the cavalry, because not only were they fewer in number, but they also didn't actually fight on horseback, so some of the cavalry had to opt out of fighting just to hold everyone else's horses for them. But it also sucks for the infantry, because every time they have to fight they basically all have to stop marching, and most of them have to get off the road and scramble over ditches and fences so they can line up right. And then they succeed in pushing the cavalry back a little bit, which the cavalry had actually planned for so they've got a few spots down Chambersburg Pike where they can retreat, and they have time to do that because before the infantry can follow them, they keep having to scramble back out of the fields and pastures and back into lines on the road.

Late in the morning, the Union cavalry finally got their first infantry reinforcements, the 1st Corp led by General Reynolds. He deployed the infantry to the north and south of Chambersburg Pike, including in that woods at the bottom of the picture. The woods mark the spot where he was also almost immediately killed, poor dude. Abner Doubleday was field promoted to take his place. But later that day, when General Meade finally arrived, he demoted Doubleday and made somebody else the 1st Corps Commander, and Doubleday pretty much sulked about that for the rest of his life.

Also, he maybe invented baseball.

The best part of the Google Map is that you can use all the memorials to figure out where everybody was in the battle. My favorite memorial is for John Burns, just north of the woods. He was just some old dude, a random pissed off civilian who'd already been agitating against the Confederate occupation in the previous days (including citizen arresting a few Confederates during their earlier pass-through, lol!), and who on this day took himself out onto the battlefield with an antique Revolutionary War musket to get those damn Confederates off his lawn, goddamnit! 

At one point, he managed to wheedle a proper rifle off of a wounded Union infantryman, and at another point, the general of the Pennsylvania infantry was able to convince him to at least go fight in the woods where he'd be out of the sun (and possibly the way, ahem). Burns paid him back, though, by fighting like a total badass in the woods, even shooting a Confederate officer clean off his horse. And later, when he was wounded and had to be left on the field while the Union soldiers retreated (more on that later), he convinced the Confederates that he was actually a non-combatant who'd just happened to get caught up in the cross-fire. They apparently didn't recognize him from his earlier agitation against Confederate troops, so they let him go back to town, where he recovered from his wounds and lived another nine years as a national hero.

Fun fact: when Abraham Lincoln came to Gettysburg the next year to dedicate the new national cemetery, he was asked if there was anything he wanted to do in town, and he replied that actually, he'd quite like to meet John Burns. So he did, and by all reports the two got along great!

Anyway, it's a good thing that Reynolds had deployed some of the Union forces north of Chambersburg Pike, because there was a whole northern segment of the Confederates, who'd been pillaging and looting north of Gettysburg, who had now managed to bust their butts to get back down south to meet those Union forces. They had a whole other fight on Oak Ridge, north of Chambersburg Pike and north of Gettysburg:

Buford's monument marks where that morning fighting was. Lincoln Highway is what they're calling Chambersburg Pike. At the bottom you can see the north edge of Gettysburg.

This spot has a nice observation tower where you can look out onto most of the first day's fighting:

This view shows where the Confederate forces came from the north:

And this view is to the southwest, back toward Chambersburg Pike and the morning battles:

There was a lot of back-and-forthing, and the monuments here are interesting to read because they're all, "In this spot so-and-so division was posted, then they advanced and shot some people, then they retreated and were shot at, then they advanced again for a little bit and did some more shooting, then they were chased screaming through town. Most of them died." Out of the 296 soldiers from the Pennsylvania division that this monument memorializes, seven were killed, 52 were wounded, and 31 were either captured or just plain went missing:

These new Confederate forces coming in from the north actually overwhelmed the Union force, who retreated south through the streets of Gettysburg (while the citizens cowered in their basements) all the way through town. Just south of town were two hills, one wooded and one bare, and that's where the Union was finally able to make their stand to end out the first day of battle.

The Gettysburg National Cemetery/Evergreen Cemetery area and Culp's Hill are where they ended up: 

And that's the end of the first day of battle!

Next up: dinner in a former field hospital, then a ghost tour with the world's most reluctant ghost tour guide.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Sewing American Girl Doll Clothes Is My New Mid-Life Crisis Hobby

One Facebook Story of my little niece holding her brand-new American Girl doll later, and my summer fate is sealed!

The art of sewing doll clothes is fairly new to me, but I always like to learn new things. And once upon a time I would also have told you that the sewing of tiny garments full of fussy, precise details did not appeal to me, but tbh I think that I, myself, am growing fussier as I age, because I kind of don't mind it now. So many precise 1/4" seams! So much tidy edge stitching! Such fussy cutting of novelty prints! I used to hurry through all my sewing to get to the finish as quickly as possible, more than ready to move on to the next exciting thing, but lately I've been pretty into the process, taking my time and focusing on the details and whiling away whole evenings puttering through a project while listening to endless audiobooks.

I just finished Endgame, which was a biography of Bobby Fisher, and now I'm ready for The Long Game, the last book in my hockey smut series!

There are several books of patterns for 18" dolls that I want to sew my way through, and first up is Doll Couture, a book that I actually own but never found the time to dive into when my own little American Girl doll enthusiasts were the right ages to have appreciated my work. Good thing I've got a new audience now!

This simple dress, a sleeveless bodice with a gathered skirt, is my first project:

Highly recommend owning an entire roll of tracing paper--it's so handy!

The instructions in this book are shockingly difficult to parse--they literally didn't tell me that the dress is supposed to come together like this--

--so at every stage I kept trying to sew the skirt into a circle, or stitch the bodice back closed, and once I thought I'd finally figured out what the step I was looking at said to do and ended up sewing the bodice shut at the bottom(?!?), but eventually my very own little Goodwill American Girl doll modeled a well-fitting dress for me:

I literally found her at Goodwill for eight dollars! I LOVE her! I think she's going to be my own personal version of the porch goose, and she's going to have SO many handmade outfits for all seasons and holidays. I need to fix her hair, though, so please send me all your best tips for untangling American Girl doll hair.

And then I sewed another!

I do really like all the tidy details involved, all the edge stitching and stitching down my seams and how nice everything looks when freshly ironed.

Oops, gotta trim that thread!

I experimented with a puffier skirt for the Halloween dress, and I find it much improved.

I really like how well-proportioned small-scale novelty prints look in an 18" doll's garment, and my plan is to use up as many of my novelty prints as possible sewing my niece a wardrobe of doll clothes for her birthday.

I've also been working hard to upgrade my photo set-up:

That's two softboxes plus a giant flexible vinyl panel from Menards that I clamp to my tabletop and sort of slither up the wall to make a seamless backdrop. Vinyl is such a bummer, but I love how it looks.

Now that I've finally cracked what the instructions wanted me to do, this dress is the simplest thing in the world to sew, and it turns out so cute every time. I even upgraded some bits, like fully lining the skirt and finishing the side seams, so mental note to make physical notes so I don't forget!

I considered appliqueing one of the gingerbreads from the skirt fabric onto the bodice, but I thought that it might look too baby-ish to the sophisticated eyes of its future six-year-old recipient. I kind of wish I'd done it anyway, though, because surely one can't have too many gingerbreads on one's outfit!

I had to make myself stop at two dresses for my niece's doll, though, because I have a lot of different patterns that I want to try. But it's surely not too late to sew just a couple of dresses for my own girls' childhood American Girl dolls, so carefully put away in the top of my closet (until I got them out to serve as extra fashion models for these photo shoots, ahem...). 

And of course my own little American Girl doll will need some outfits to wear when she's not helping me out with her fit checks of the garments I'm sewing!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!