If you see TWO people crying on a Civil War battlefield, then it's me AND a ghost!
In some ways, I'm finding this second school year of a completely empty nest to be easier than the first. I'm not sobbing in the shower every day, and I'm definitely not in that baffling state of mourning humans who are very much alive and well that seems specific to early days empty nesters. Yes, I maaaaaybe cried on a Civil War battlefield, but 1) I'd just finished dropping off the second kid less than 24 hours prior and wouldn't see her again until Fall Break, and 2) Civil War battlefields are sad! So many people died!
I've got my little autistic daily to-do list that I make for myself that keeps me busy all day, every day, both with productive things like, you know, work, and with less helpful things like painting that last damn family room wall that the entire family convinced me not to paint over the summer because it was too much hassle and didn't need to be done. Well, jokes on them, because when 2/3 of the people telling me not to do something moved out, I did it anyway!
And when the years start looming over my head and I remember that my job, while fun and intellectually rewarding, is tenuous and also high-key evil, and I wonder what on earth people are supposed to be DOING with their lives when they don't have, like, some kind of noble calling or pursuit or whatever to dedicate themselves to, I just shove those thoughts back down where they came from and see what's next on my little autistic to-do list. Ooh, I need to scoop the litter boxes!
ANYWAY, look at this sweet little moth that stopped to rest on my partner's hand at Harpers Ferry:
You can tell it's a moth because it holds its wings flat while it's resting.
Just between us, I wasn't real revved up about visiting either Harpers Ferry or Antietam, but my deluxe national parks passport book is just another kind of little autistic to-do list, so obviously I've got to visit every national park site I can make an excuse to get to. AND back in May I bought myself a whole entire America the Beautiful pass so now I'm obsessed with getting my money's worth from it, and that means detouring to find all the national park sites that have entrance fees.
I saved forty bucks in entrance fees on this trip, and you don't need to ask how much I spent on gas or a hotel, because it's none of my business!
Harpers Ferry wasn't quite at Grand Canyon levels of crowded, but it was a LOT more crowded than I thought it would be, considering how not super revved up I, personally, was about it. I mean, just last year the big kid and I were literally the only visitors to Johnstown Flood National Memorial when we were there, and Johnstown Flood is objectively AMAZING!
To be fair, it turns out that Harpers Ferry is amazing, too, so I am SUPER glad that my little autistic to-do list brought me there!
And there actually IS a ferry! Or, at least, a bus that ferries you from the parking lot/visitor center down to the historic old town. If I'd had the whole day there we would have walked, but the plan was to hit up Antietam in the afternoon, so ferried by bus it was!
I sometimes wheedle my partner into reminiscing about a particular family road trip he took when he was a kid. He describes the trip as hot and muggy, and mostly consisting of battlefields, many of which he refused to get out of the car to look at. It's hilarious getting him to tell all the things he actually remembers from the trip, especially when you make him separate out the memories solely about baseball cards and road snacks and fighting with his brother from the memories of actual sightseeing.
He has no memories of whether or not he went to Antietam on this trip (although he must have--it's right there!), but he remembers exactly one thing about Harpers Ferry: there was a sign that showed you the heights of a bunch of old floods.
Here, then, is the only memorable thing about Harpers Ferry if you're a ten-year-old kid on a road trip across the Great Battlefields of America:
1985 was already on the sign by the time he visited, assuming they engrave their flood dates in a timely manner, but those 1996s are certainly new:
There's plenty of room for new floods in the middle, but if something happens that exceeds the big flood of 1936 they're going to have to add a new board!
Here's why they get so many floods:
Harpers Ferry is at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, and there's not much of a riparian buffer zone between the rivers and the old part of the town. But that does mean that you can stroll along right next to the water, and it's especially pleasant on a bright summer morning:
Here's a nice view of the piers of an old bridge in the foreground, then the original site of Robert Harper's actually ferry, then a railroad bridge and a pedestrian bridge that's also part of the Appalachian Trail.
We kept to the outskirts of the old town, checking out the fire engine house where John Brown and his followers barricaded themselves during their raid:
Here's my partner embodying the mentality of domestic terrorism for a righteous cause:
That's not its original spot, though, because the "fort" went on something of a national tour for a few decades, and while it was gone the railroad built up the site where it had been located into an embankment. But you can climb the embankment to the original location of the armory and find a monument marking where the fort was when John Brown used it:
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| I was trying to get a shot of the monument in the foreground and the fort in the background, when this group of youths arrived and started picnicking across half my photo. They looked so cheerful and wholesome that I bet they were Girl Scouts. |
There's another lovely view over the river from the armory site:
We checked out the starting point of the Lewis and Clark expedition, then sort of sideswiped the edge of town to hit the Appalachian Trail for a bit.
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| I'm looking at the website right now, where it tells me very firmly NOT to climb this rock, but in my own defense, there was zero guidance, either written or verbal, about this at the site, and also everyone else was doing it. |
Anyway, it IS a really pretty view if you stand exactly where you're not supposed to:
I really wanted to walk the Appalachian Trail in the other direction for a bit, too, mostly because you get to go on this pedestrian bridge right next to a working railroad bridge across the Potomac and it looked like it led right into a super creepy tunnel where there are definitely zombies (I later learned that the pedestrians don't get to go through the tunnel so I'm glad I didn't blow up our afternoon plans for it)--
--but the afternoon was already wearing on, and we had to make time to go here!
As always, Visitor Center (and the gift shop and passport stamps) first!
The museum inside the Visitor Center was just two rooms and most of the artifacts were off display, but as someone coming in cold, with only my AP US History knowledge of the Civil War (great for the politics and economics and human geography aspects, but not so much for the specifics of exactly who did what exactly where and exactly when), it was a super helpful grounding, with actually a lot more context than I thought I'd get:
I thought that this explanation of the two sides of the slavery issue as evidenced by two Maryland citizens was an insightful way to approach the conversation:
And this display piece simply cracked me up:
Okay, NOW it's time for the specifics of exactly who did what exactly where and exactly when!
I don't usually love the start and stop, hop in and out of the car style of battlefield tours, but Antietam is so thoughtfully preserved and restored that it drew me in immediately. There's the self-guided tour with the specifics of who did what where, of course, but my favorite thing by far was the placement of structures that tell the story at an almost sensorial level. For example, wherever you see a split rail fence, that represents where an actual fence was on the day of the battle. And there are 30 acres of corn planted there on the site of the Millers' 30-acre cornfield where the bloodiest fight of the bloodiest day of the Civil War occurred:
They were created within the same generation as the Civil War, the brainchild of a Union general who was so interested in getting every exact detail that he essentially created a letter-writing campaign to survey all the surviving soldiers. He was only interested in the tactics and so didn't do anything interesting with the other stories they told him about the tragedies and horrors of war, BUT the circumstance of the correspondence alone worked to get those extraneous stories they told into the public record.
Conveniently, the existence of the cornfield and the surrounding fencing probably keeps people from traipsing all over that spot and hunting for artifacts. There were a couple of volunteer docents staged at a few sites around the tour, and I sort of wondered if they were positioned at the spots most vulnerable to artifact poaching.
Cannons, like the one here at West Woods, are placed on the sites where actual cannons were placed during the battle:
The barrels of the cannons are also from the Civil War.
The West Woods itself is in the long-term process of being reforested to look more like it did during the battle, but you can hike into it kind of at the front of where the Confederate line was:
It's crazy, though, to think that on the day of the battle, the only trails in these woods would have been ones made by deer, and so everyone would have been dodging and hiding behind trees and the visibility would have been so low. I don't know if this would have been an old-growth forest at the time, though, so they may or may not have also been getting tangled up in every type of underbrush and briar. The woods on my property was partly cleared and farmed once upon a time a 100+ years ago, and it's still got a lot of tangly undergrowth around the slower-growing trees.
Although there's a lot of more contemporary wayside signage, if you want a real deep-dive into exactly who did exactly what exactly where and exactly when, there are also these VERY thorough signs strewn around the battlefield:
They were created within the same generation as the Civil War, the brainchild of a Union general who was so interested in getting every exact detail that he essentially created a letter-writing campaign to survey all the surviving soldiers. He was only interested in the tactics and so didn't do anything interesting with the other stories they told him about the tragedies and horrors of war, BUT the circumstance of the correspondence alone worked to get those extraneous stories they told into the public record.
I liked this view from the West Woods, in which you can see the Millers house and their cornfield. The Confederate survivors from the cornfield ran this way into the West Woods, and Union troops followed them, but what the Union soldiers didn't know was that there was another whole group of fresh Confederates coming into the woods from the south. They outflanked the Union soldiers and it got so chaotic that Union soldiers were literally shooting at each other as well as at the Confederates:
Meanwhile, just southeast of the cornfield and the West Woods was a farm lane that went along between two properties and led from the turnpike to the west to a gristmill over by the creek. Generations of wagons full of grain and flour had worn down the level of the lane so it was a few feet lower than the surrounding land, kind of like a buffalo trace only wider. on both sides, there was more corn--
Eventually, the Union soldiers captured the lane and the Confederates retreated to a nearby farm. The Union followed them but couldn't take the farm so they retreated, too. At the end of the day there was essentially no gain of ground by either side, but in the process over 5,000 people were wounded or killed just from that set of skirmishes.
Meanwhile, just southeast of the cornfield and the West Woods was a farm lane that went along between two properties and led from the turnpike to the west to a gristmill over by the creek. Generations of wagons full of grain and flour had worn down the level of the lane so it was a few feet lower than the surrounding land, kind of like a buffalo trace only wider. on both sides, there was more corn--
--and more fencing:
In a strategy reminiscent of the following generation's trench warfare, Confederate soldiers were stationed here to "hold the line." But as the Union soldiers in the West Woods were being massacred, more Union soldiers came in from the northeast to attack the Confederates holding the Sunken Lane, and there was a simultaneous massacre of Confederates.
Eventually, the Union soldiers captured the lane and the Confederates retreated to a nearby farm. The Union followed them but couldn't take the farm so they retreated, too. At the end of the day there was essentially no gain of ground by either side, but in the process over 5,000 people were wounded or killed just from that set of skirmishes.
Here's where I was all, "Wait, WHAT are they all doing right here?!? Was Antietam a major supply depot? It wasn't a port city. Did some famous politicians set up shop here?" I finally figured out that it was all because Confederate General Robert E. Lee was trying to invade Maryland, and Union General McClellan was chasing him down, so this was basically just the spot that Lee picked to stop and try to kill off his pursuers. So all these skirmishes aren't even necessarily *about* gaining ground or whatever--these two armies were literally just trying to kill each other. It's really easy to get lost in the weeds when you're touring a Civil War battlefield!
Meanwhile, in a completely different spot south way southeast of all of this, Confederate troops were holding this one bridge that spanned Antietam Creek and kept the Union forces coming from the east away from the town of Sharpsburg and the rest of the battle:
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| This is from the Union side. |
There weren't a lot of them, but the lay of the land and the relatively narrow bridge crossing meant that they held the line for a few hours, slaughtering any Union soldiers who tried to cross:
Eventually, though, some Union soldiers finally got the idea to try crossing downstream from the bridge where the Confederate weapons couldn't reach them, and the Confederate soldiers were starting to run low on ammunition, anyway:
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| This is looking downstream. |
So when the Confederates got outflanked AND outgunned they finally retreated, but they'd held the line so long that more Confederate reinforcements, marching up from their battle at Harpers Ferry, had time to get to them.
This sycamore by the bridge is famous because there's photos of it as a little sycamore in the aftermath of the battle:
There were a couple more spots on the driving tour, but as we were navigating to the next one we got turned around a little, and then we were all, "Hey, is that a WINERY right next to the battlefield?!?"
So, since we figured we knew how the Civil War ended, and since the afternoon was getting on and pretty soon we'd have to head out on the rest of the drive to our overnight spot well west of here, we decided to close out our tour of Antietam with a shared flight of wine:
In conclusion, Antietam was kind of a stupid battle and I can't believe they killed or wounded over 23,000 people over it, and then left a huge mountain of rotting corpses for the innocent citizens of Sharpsburg and the surrounding countryside to deal with.
P.S. Come find me over on my Facebook page, where I often talk about my adventures, experiments, misadventures, and yet more misadventures as I'm doing them!
