Memorial Day 2023

29 May 2023: Attended the Memorial Day ceremony at Antietam today. It was so interesting and moving. Every time I am there, I have a hard time imagining what happened there--or what happened on any battlefield. What a privilege that is--to have that distance. At the very end, when two bugles played "Taps," I teared up, surprising myself a bit.  

Honestly, the Park Service needs to put me on the payroll...

Can you guess where this lovely photo was taken? (The letters on the building ought to give you a clue.)



My third visit here since May was actually a lot of fun. No complaints!

Other sites around Antietam

When my parents and I visited the park before, we rented this audio CD that you can play in your car as you drive through the battlefield. It can take well over two hours to do this, and we (thankfully) we didn't do it again on this visit. Don't get me wrong--it was all quite interesting, but I didn't really want to do it all again so soon. So we did the highlights portion instead, with my dad and I acting as guides for the rest of the group. As my dad explained it, there are about four must-see stops on the tour:

1) the Dunker Church (check--see post below).

2) The Cornfield, site of the bloodiest part of the battle, where troops fought to a stalemate for much of the morning. According to one soldier, the field "was so full of bodies that a man could have walked through it without stepping on the ground."



3) Bloody Lane (check--see picture of Kelsie below. The Ohio Monument--further down in this post--was also at this stop). Here about 5600 men died between 9:30 and 1:00. Amazing.

4) Burnside's Bridge, which General Burnside struggled to get his troops across, even though they greatly outnumbered the Confederates defending the position.


Burnside's bridge is actually quite a beautiful spot. In fact, there is beauty throughout the battlefield--lots of plants and trees, and wildlife, too. The first time we visited it, I saw a big snake sunning himself on the bridge. This time, all I managed was this pretty shot of a butterfly.



You could spend several days seeing everything there is to see around the battlefield. I am just going to post a few more shots to give you a taste.

Of course, there are monuments everywhere. It's cool to think that each one of them has a separate and no doubt interesting story (or collection of stories) behind it. Here's a shot of three in a row. I really like the ones with soldiers on top.



Many of the monuments are also tributes to soldiers from specific states. Here's one for Pennsylvania, which, by the way, was well-represented.



Just for Shannon and Heather, I got Kelsie to pose in front of a monument for the soldiers from Ohio. Go Buckeyes!



As I mentioned in a previous post, there are also monuments marking where six generals were killed or fatally wounded. These sites are marked by upside down cannons, as you can see below. This particular marker is for Brigadier General George E. Anderson, of the Confederate States of America. You can read about him and the other generals killed at Antietam here.



So that wraps it up for Antietam, although I will add this brief postscript. This past weekend, when my sister Tara, her husband, and their two kids visited, we were talking about my guests the weekend before, and I mentioned to my sister my initial mixed feeling about visiting for a second time so close to my first visit. "But it turned out to be a fun afternoon," I said. "So," she said, "does that mean you would be willing to go back again for a third time?" Long story short, guess where I spent a large part of my Labor Day? And again, it was a nice way to spend the afternoon. But seriously, the National Park Service should consider putting me on the payroll. Maybe I'll post some more pictures of that visit.

Reenactors at Antietam

While we were visiting Antietam, I noticed a sign on the visitor's center that explained there would be reenactors from a Virginia Civil War group camped outside the Dunker Church, the first stop on the driving tour. "They will be available to answer questions," the sign noted. I think the troop might have been the 7th Virginia Infantry Company, but I can't remember for sure. Anyway, it turned out to be a great way to start our tour through the battlefield.



Here are a couple of shots of the soldiers set up outside the church. It was hot that day, and I would have been very uncomfortable if I were them. They also explained that they had slept outside in the tents the night before through much of a terrible rainstorm. When it got to be too much, they took refuge in the church. (Hey, that works on multiple levels, right?) Note the wonderful historical accuracy in the first photo, spoiled (like so many things) by an SUV parked behind the camp.





At first, my family was just milling around the site, looking at the soldiers and their props. I remembered what that sign had said, though, about asking questions. I also remembered those very eager and knowledgeable lighthouse guides in Cape Cod, who were also volunteers with a great passion for their subject matter. I knew these guys were itching to answer questions, so Kelsie and I walked up to one and asked him what they were cooking on the fire. That opened the floodgates for questions from the others, including my brother, who promptly began a very manly discussion about guns and bullets with a friendly reenactor. Witness the testosterone-filled photo below.



Just before we left, I asked the reenactor if I could take his picture with Kelsie, and he was happy to oblige. He didn't smile, though. Later I told Kelsie that no one really smiled for pictures back then, in part because they had such bad teeth. She got a kick out of that.



Okay--off to teach. More posts later!

Sorry it's been taking me awhile to get new posts up. I've had family visiting the past two weekends, which has been awesome, but also meant I've had a lot of catch-up work to do during the week.

Antietam Battlefield

Last Sunday, my family and I visited Antietam, site of the bloodiest day of fighting in the Civil War. The battlefield is only about fifteen minutes from Shepherdstown. My parents and I had actually visited once before, back in May when we were trying to get the lay of the land and find housing options for my move here. At first I wasn't too excited about going back to a place I had just been to a few months before, especially with a couple of kids in tow, but it turned out to be a nice afternoon.

I didn't actually to look through the small museum the battlefield has this time, as Aidan was being fussy. Since I'd just seen it a couple of months ago, I took him outside in the stroller. The park, of course, has tons of green space and lots of interesting things to look at--the perfect kind of place to let an antsy two-year-old expend some energy. We eventually wound up at the New York monument near the main entrance, a big impressive tribute to the soldiers from my home state, complete with stairs for Aidan to run up and down and four sides to play peek-a-boo around while we waited for the grown-ups to finish inside.

I asked Aidan to make a funny face, and here's what I got:



Actually, visiting with the kids (especially with Kelsie) gave me a new perspective on the battle, or at least a new perspective on how kids learn history. Kelsie is only 8 and is about to start fourth grade, so she doesn't know that much about history and wars yet. It's kind of sad that part of growing up and getting educated is learning about so many painful events from the past. This is something that's been on my mind this past week, as we are discussing what it means to be educated in my English 101 classes, reading works like Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" and the excerpt from Frederick Douglass's Narrative in which he discusses how learning is both a blessing and a curse. I am reminded of Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, who wants so badly to keep children from losing their innocence and growing up.

So all of this is context for me seeing Kelsie experience Antietam. I don't think she really got the magnitude of what happened there in 1862, but who among us can really say we fully understand a battle in which 23,000 men were killed or wounded in twelve hours? Kelsie seemed intrigued by the photo below. It's a rather iconic photograph, taken by Alexander Gardner and shows dead bodies in front of the Dunker Church. The museum at the battlefield has a blown up version of it right as you come in, and later on, while we stood at the Dunker Church, she asked if that's where the photo was taken.

After we were done watching the reenactors (a post on that will come next) at the church and made our way back to the cars to drive to the next stop (the battlefield is, of course, so big that you drive from stop to stop), she asked if that small bit of field we just saw was the battlefield. I tried to explain that the battlefield stretched for miles and miles, and again, I am not sure if it sunk in completely.

At another stop, we saw a monument dedicated to one of the generals who died at Antietam (post on that to come, too), and she asked, "Was he on our side?" That was a complicated answer, since the general had fought for the confederacy. "Yes and no," I explained. So we talked about the Civil War--how the North and South fought each other--and how after the war was over, the nation (slowly) healed. She asked, "Why did they fight?" and I gave her my own answer, which I know people like to argue about. "Well, basically it was over slavery." "Lincoln freed the slaves!" she eagerly volunteered, proud of something she learned in school. Earlier that day, she had also confidently identified Lincoln in this other iconic picture where he's meeting with General McClellan. Again, this was all quite interesting to me--to see what she knew and try to teach her just enough for her to know some more without her getting overwhelmed and confused. Here's a picture of her posing at the site known as "Bloody Lane."

In the end, I am not sure how much Kelsie learned at Antietam. I know that she had fun walking around the green spaces and seeing the monuments, trees, and flowers. Seeing it all through her eyes gave me a lot to think about--and reminded me of when I was a kid and we visited places like Gettysburg and Fort Ticonderoga.