Traveling to the Antietam Battlefield

On Tuesday, we drove about 1.5 hours to Antietam, Maryland to learn more about the Antietam Battlefield and Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. We had an all day (8.5 hours!) private tour with our guide, Matthew who was a trained Masters-level historian. He was awesome and we learned so much! We started our day overlooking the Antietam Battlefield. It was another spectacular spring day! 

Antietam holds the distinction of being “the Bloodiest Day” in American history - 23,000 soldiers were killed, wounded, or missing in action after 12 hours of fierce combat on September 17, 1962. The Battle of Antietam also ended the Confederate Army’s first invasion into the North and led Abraham Lincoln to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation which ultimately freed the slaves in the states that had succeeded from the Union. 

We learned a lot from both our tours at Gettysburg and Antietam about how both the Union and Confederate armies took over farms as the battles started in this beautiful countryside. Sometimes the armies basically used the farms to “feed their troops” and conscripted the local farmers’ food stores, crops, and animals. Many times, the farms became makeshift hospitals that were filled with wounded soldiers in these bloody battles. There is no question that the Civil War had a huge impact on the local populations. Can you imagine having your farm taken over, your home becoming a hospital, and discovering hundreds of dead bodies and horses left on your fields? 

In the North, most of the Civil War Battlefields are under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service. In the last 15 years, the Park Service has invested in repairing infrastructure to look as it did in the 1860s as well as working towards recreating the actual landscape to resemble what the Union and Confederate soldiers saw. In some cases, this has meant taking down trees that have grown up since the war. This is a long ongoing process, but is part of the mission of the restoration of the battlefields. 

One of the terms we learned about was “Witness Trees.” These are trees that the Park Service has designated as trees that were there at the time of the Civil War and “witnessed” the battles. 

Once again, we all kept commenting on how beautiful the rolling hills, the flowering pastures, and the streams were - it seemed so incongruous to think about these same fields being destroyed with artillery, death and destruction.