13 Hidden, Haunted, Hotspots of Gettysburg
The next three entries of my “13 Hidden, Haunted, Hotspots of Gettysburg” blog series will go together in an historical way. They are about places of great horror and suffering, where human emotion and anguish overflowed. Death was considered a welcome, considerate, merciful friend.
Battles don’t produce just dead men; they also produce the wounded. And wounds that are not immediately mortal are as random and varied as there are wounded men. It would seem, after seeing the end results of a battle, that the God of War is not really a god at all, but instead must be the most creative of all demons. A cursory look into the several volumes of The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, by Joseph K. Barnes (1877), will convince the reader of the complete arbitrary nature of being wounded during the Civil War.
Once you were struck by a soft lead minie ball flying at
approximately 900 feet per second what happened next depended upon where you
were struck. Hit in an extremity—an arm or a leg—the lead bullet would flatten
and pulverize the bone. The sheer volume of wounded pouring into a field
hospital rendered a lengthy repair and setting of the bone an impossibility.
The most efficient thing to do was to amputate the limb as quickly as possible
and bring in the next patient.
If you were struck in the torso, the surgeon’s job was even
simpler. Make the patient as comfortable as possible—in other words, lay him on
some straw in a corner of a barn or outbuilding somewhere—and let him die in
peace. Internal surgery was almost unknown during the Civil War and with a
battle raging nearby and hundreds of other wounded who might be saved, a
lengthy, complicated operation was just not in the cards.
Ironically, leaving a gut-shot soldier alone might have been
the best thing a Civil War surgeon could do for him.
A hypothetical scene from a field hospital on any Civil War
battlefield: A soldier, wounded in the intestines, is laid upon the operating
table and a surgeon does a brief examination with his fingers to see how
extensive the damage is. Finding that there is nothing he can do, he tells the
orderlies to move the patient and bring in the next, a young man in good health
with just a minor flesh wound on his arm. The surgeon pokes around with the
same fingers that just examined the previous soldier’s intestines, makes sure
the bullet is nowhere to be found in the arm and has the orderlies bandage the
arm. “You’ll be fine,” he assures the young man with the arm wound. About two weeks
later, the soldier with the gut wound is being sent home to recuperate. The
young man with the minor arm wound feels fine one day, but is dead the next of
tetanus or blood-poisoning from the introduction of bacteria by the surgeon’s
dirty hands.
Joseph Lister didn’t develop his method of antiseptic
surgery until 1865-67, sadly just after when it may have been needed most in
America.
At least the field care for those wounded on the battlefield
had become more organized. Aid stations, like Hospital Woods, were set up just
behind the battle lines to care for the wounded as quickly as possible and
preparing the men for transportation to a larger field hospital, in a safer
location where surgical operations could take place, like along Hospital Road.
Still, the scores of field hospitals spread out all over the vicinity of the
battlefield of Gettysburg presented a logistical nightmare for the delivery of
food and medical supplies. Finally, a general hospital was created—Camp
Letterman—to which the wounded were gathered to recover or finally succumb to
their traumatic injuries.
All three of these types of hospital sites are still extant
at Gettysburg, although they look nothing like they did from the morning of
July 1, 1863, when the first wounded man arrived at an aid station behind
McPherson’s Ridge, until the last man left by train from Camp Letterman around
November 21, 1863, four and a half months after they had been wounded.
I devoted an entire chapter in Ghosts of Gettysburg IV to a house located across the road from hospital woods, which displayed an unusual amount of poltergeist activity.
Activity in the house began with just a few anomalous events
which happened while the owner was out of town: a throw pillow which she always
placed “just-so” on her sofa was out of place when she returned; a book on a
side table was moved from the center of the table where she always placed it,
to the edge. Her husband had died a year or so before, so she was alone in the
house, which made the escalating activity even more frightening.
One night she was awakened by foyer lights aglow, visible
from under her closed bedroom door. She had turned them off when she went to
bed. Then there were the shutters on the basement windows that were closed when
she came up from the basement, but opened when she returned less than an hour
later. Once again, she had been out of town and when she returned she noticed
that the door to her guest room was scuffed and damaged as if someone had been
kicking at it.
While upstairs on the phone, she heard the loud, solid
“thunk” of the basement door closing. She excused herself from her caller and
went down to find the basement door wide open. That same night, around 10:15,
she went downstairs to get a drink. She noticed that one-half of her louvered
doors to the dining room were open—doors she had habitually kept closed and was
sure she had closed when she had ascended for bed earlier.
Electronic equipment began to act oddly in the house. After
playing an audiotape to the end, she went upstairs to bed. At 2:30 in the
morning she awoke to the tape downstairs playing. Somehow it had been rewound
and began to replay from the beginning.
I received a fax from her home office one night that said
the book on the side table had been moved again to the edge, and that three
nail holes had been driven destructively into the tabletop. Also, her
grandfather clock had just struck midnight although it was only 11:15 p.m.
Again she went out of town only to return to find that her
husband‘s heavy bureau in their bedroom—which would have taken a couple of men
to move, was moved out from the wall. As well, the bathroom sink in her
husband’s bathroom had been used, as if someone had brushed their teeth and not
cleaned up. After another trip she said that another sink in the house—the one
in the guest room—appeared to have been used and the heavy bureau had been
moved six or eight inches…sideways, this time.
She was wont to blame it on a female neighbor who had
committed suicide a number of years back and who had been seen upon occasion
walking along the street she had strolled along in life. She had even been seen
in some of her former neighbor’s houses on Country Club Lane.
To me, the heavy lifting and destructive behavior signal
only one thing: powerful men. Perhaps soldiers on an invasion of Yankee-dom,
bent on wreaking havoc on civilians in revenge for what the Yankees did to
their homes a century and a half before. Only this time in spirit form….
Directions to Hospital Woods Aid Station site:
Head out Route 30 West to Country Club Lane. Turn left and follow Country Club
Lane until it makes a 90 degree left turn followed by a 90 degree right turn.
All the woods on your right are “hospital woods.”
This is National Park Service property and subject to the
same restrictions as other parts of the Park.
[image error] Hospital Woods
This section of woods is probably one of the first areas to serve as an aid station, since it is so close to the first day’s fighting and located near Willoughby Run, a source of water for the wounded. It is in the rear of the Confederate lines and is cited as a Confederate Hospital site in Gregory Coco’s classic book A Vast Sea of Misery: A History and Guide to the Union and Confederate Field Hospitals at Gettysburg July 1-November 20, 1863.
Coco also wrote in another of his books Wasted Valor: The Confederate Dead at Gettysburg, that about 63 Confederates were buried in the area. How many were exhumed, or if more than that were buried and never found, is not recorded.
