Kristin's parents visited this week ... trailing along their new RV ... and camped a few miles from us at Little Bennett Park, which is near Clarksburg, MD [a very small town]. I took this photo in Clarksburg. It adorns the outside of the local dentist office. Seriously.
We all decided that we'd take a trip out to Sharpsburg, MD and visit the Antietam Battlefield.
Here's the RV.
The ever-lovely Kristin with her dad.
We get the convertible ready for the trip west ...
We find ... surprisingly ... a very nice, reasonable restaurant on the Main Street of Sharpsburg. A Wine Bar no less.
The outside of the Dunker Church, near where Jackson posted his divisions.
Here's the interior of the church.
A nearby monument to the Maryland Regiments [both Union and Confederate] that fought in the battle.
Kristin's dad checks a muzzle-loader.
Here's the "Sunken Road". I chose a photo that includes a person, just for scale. Here John B. Gordon [who was at the time, I believe, only a Colonel] held off the brunt of the Union advance against Lee's center. The Union finally broke the Confederate line at this point, but McClellan's refusal to follow up made it all pretty much pointless. He could have ended the war.
John B. Gordon was a Georgian. By the end of the war he was a Corp commander and one of Lee's most trusted advisers. After the war he worked hard to assist reconstruction and ended up serving as a US Senator for Georgia.
He was not a professional soldier. Despite that, he rose further than any other soldier ... professional or non-professional ... in the Army of Northern VA. A remarkable feat ... especially for someone not a Virginian.
I share a birthday with him, February 6. Sadly, I also share the same birthday with the idiot General J.E.B. Stuart.
Typical rail fences ... Kristin's parents [both from Michigan] got a huge kick out of these. Really.
Here's a Georgian's eye view of Burnside's Bridge. From this position, Robert Toombs' 500 Georgians held off Burnside's entire Corps for several hours. Burnside insisted on using this bridge, and wasted hundreds of lives trying to storm it when, frankly, his men could have easily waded across the stream at this point. That's why the bridge still bears his name. A fitting tribute to vain stupidity.
Burnside was also responsible for two other major fiascoes during the war. First there was the series of charges against Marye's Heights in Fredricksburg VA in which the casualties approached 10,000. Then there was "The Crater" during the siege of Petersburg, VA near the end of the war. That bungle pretty much ended his career.
It was hard to get a photo that shows just how shallow the Antietam creek is at this point, but this is as close as I could get.
As usual, just click on any image to get a larger, more detailed view.
