After studying the Antietam burial map, you can never again walk the Antietam battlefield without wondering if you’re stepping on somebody.
For example, many people checking out the visitors’ center (undergoing renovations) walk down the grassy lawn (or along the paved path) and cross the Dunker Church Road to visit the Dunker Church. Some people follow the Antietam Remembered Trail leading to the nearby Maryland Monument, and the church lies a short side trip along the way.
Except for the representative artillery and limbers and quaint, white-painted Dunker Church, nothing warlike mars the landscape.
But this area was a charnel house during and after the battle. Union artillery tore up Confederate batteries, and afterwards Union soldiers laid out dead Confederates for burial. A famous photograph shows dead Confederates laid out with the church in the background.
When the burying ended, Confederates filled the ground between the Dunker Church and where the artillery display stands near the modern visitors’ center. The Antietam burial map clearly shows that this area was a decent-sized cemetery.
And the next time I walk from the visitors’ center to the Dunker Church, I will wonder, “Did they dig up everybody?”
Then there’s the 24-acre cornfield, forever known as the Bloody Cornfield, through which Yanks and Rebs surged while eviscerating the other guy’s ranks. Massive volleys almost wiped out entire regiments, and sometimes lying two or three bodies deep, the dead, dying, and wounded covered the broken cornstalks.
Accessible from Cornfield Avenue (a park road), the Bloody Cornfield Trail skirts the cornfield on its south and east sides before reaching the Poffenberger Farm to the north. The best time of year to experience the cornfield as the solders saw it is from late August to harvest.
With cornstalks to one side and fields and woods to the other, visitors enjoy nature’s beauty and peace. Peace reigns in this bucolic part of Washington County.
But graves once filled the cornfield, and the Cornfield Trail crosses several burial sites for Union and Confederate soldiers. In January 2009, a hiker cutting across the harvested cornfield found bone fragments and “a metal button, clotted with red clay,” near a groundhog’s hole.
National Park Service officials recovered additional bone fragments, including a jaw, and a belt buckle.
Somewhere between ages 19 and 21, the soldier belonged to a New York regiment, based on the belt buckle and buttons. He was later reburied in New York.
So if one soldier still lay buried in the Cornfield in 2009, could others remain today beneath the cornfield and its adjacent trail?
And finally there’s the Bloody Lane. Visitors usually walk the farm lane without venturing “up” the Bloody Lane Trail, which ascends the slight hill rising to the northeast. Union soldiers came down this same slope totheir Confederate-lead obliteration on September 17, 1862.
Shortly after 5 p.m. that day, the 7th Maine Infantry’s Maj. Thomas Hyde urged his nervous horse to step across Confederates piled three or four men deep in the Bloody Lane. That was a lot of men.
The Antietam burial map reveals that after the battle, Union soldiers carried or dragged almost all the dead Confederates upslope from the lane and buried them in three mass graves. The end graves lay parallel to the Bloody Lane, the middle grave perpendicular to it.
Dead Union boys were buried in long rows farther away.
The Bloody Lane section familiar to Antietam visitors stretches between two curves in the original farm road. Along this section, which is partially bordered by a farm fence, Confederate graves filled the adjacent slope.
Climb the adjacent observation tower and look down at the Bloody Lane. The ad hoc Confederate cemetery started very close to the farm fence on the right and extended upslope from there.
The next time you look west from the observation tower or walk the Bloody Angle Trail, ask yourself, “Are any graves still left here?”
The Antietam burial map does not tell us that.
A downloadable copy of the map is available here.
Sources: “Union soldier’s bones found at Antietam,” Associated Press, Frederick News-Post, January 9, 2009, updated March 11, 2016; Antietam burial map, drawn by Simon G. Elliott, New York Public Library
Next week: We meet Asa Reed, the Maine name on the Antietam burial map.
If you enjoy reading the adventures of Mainers caught up in the Civil War, be sure to like Maine at War on Facebook and get a copy of the new Maine at War Volume 1: Bladensburg to Sharpsburg, available online at Amazon and all major book retailers, including Books-A-Million and Barnes & Noble. —————————————————————————————————————–
Brian Swartz can be reached at visionsofmaine@tds.net. He enjoys hearing from Civil War buffs interested in Maine’s involvement in the war.