behind AotW

a companion to Antietam on the Web

Category: my favorites

  • the visible landscape, historic context

    the visible landscape, historic context

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    In April 1988 the US Park Service produced a report about the Antietam National Battlefield and surroundings called analysis of the visible landscape [pdf]. Its stated purpose: Recently, residents and state and local administrators have become concerned that the rural character and lifestyle of south Washington County, including Antietam National Battlefield, are being eroded by…

  • Piecing a soldier’s story together

    Piecing a soldier’s story together

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    With a nudge from a record in the Frederick Patient List database, I went looking for 2nd Lieutenant J. Corfro of Company I, 1st North Carolina Infantry, only to find he probably never existed, despite his shiny new government-issue marker at Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Frederick, MD. That Lieutenant lived only on paper, in Federal…

  • Julius Rabardy loses his leg, lives a life

    Julius Rabardy loses his leg, lives a life

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    In his diary after the battle of Antietam Private Julius Rabardy wrote: The air is full of explosions and the smell of brimstone, missiles of all kinds strike the trees and dead branches fall among the wounded. I was shot through the right thigh. A poor fellow with uplifted arm begs for water. The arm…

  • The view of a staff officer in Maryland

    The view of a staff officer in Maryland

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    Lieutenant Richard C. Shannon of the 5th Maine Infantry was assigned as aide-de-camp to Major General Henry W. Slocum, commander of the First Division, 6th Army Corps, in March 1862. Although a well-educated young man, he was still learning his profession as a staff officer in August and September 1862. Shannon left behind some wartime…

  • Charleston soul effigy headstone

    Charleston soul effigy headstone

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    Lieutenant Edwin R. White took command of the 23rd South Carolina as the senior officer remaining on the field on South Mountain on 14 September 1862 and led them at Sharpsburg on the 17th. Edwin was in the 4th generation a family of stonecutters in Charleston, noted for their gravestones and funerary sculpture, and he…

  • First Confederate soldier killed in Maryland?

    First Confederate soldier killed in Maryland?

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    While looking for something else, I came upon what may be the story of the first Confederate soldier killed on the Maryland Campaign of 1862. He was one of the earliest, certainly. [Update August 2025: Pvt Alfred Whitaker, 13th North Carolina, was killed in a skirmish on the Potomac on 5 September]. It happened on…