Not too long ago I was teasing a friend of mine about how
interesting it used to be to listen to all the “old guys” reminisce about the
Gettysburg of their younger days, when there was a such-and-such store where there
is now a 7-Eleven, or when the National Park Service used to allow whatever,
which is now illegal.

The teasing part was that now we are the “old guys” reminiscing about things younger people in
Gettysburg don’t remember.

For example, I remember talking to a woman who told me she
was selling her huge farm, one that had carried her family name for numerous
generations. “I just can’t make a living at it anymore, Mark.” The old house
and barn had been used as a hospital and was a beautiful, historic landmark for
years.

Do you want to know who bought it?

Walmart.

It was one of the first farms to sell out on Route 30 East,
which up to that time had been pristine farmland. Now, of course, it is one of
the prime areas for commercialization with scores of businesses grown up all
along both sides of the road.

There is one historic spot along the south side of York Road, however, that has somehow avoided development. It is part of the area where Camp Letterman, the large general hospital from the Battle of Gettysburg, was located.

As I mentioned in previous blogs about Gettysburg’s Hidden, Haunted, Hotspots, various
hospital sites were scattered about the countryside after the battle, beginning
with triage aide stations to the larger field hospitals where surgeries occurred.
After a couple of weeks, much of the manpower of the army had left the
Gettysburg area and the logistics became a nightmare. It proved impossible to
get food and supplies to all the individual sites caring for the wounded. The
answer was to create a General Hospital and move the wounded there.

From Greg Coco’s classic work, A Vast Sea of Misery about the Field Hospitals at Gettysburg from July 1 to November 20, 1863, I have gleaned the following:

According to Henry Janes, a volunteer surgeon for the Union
who remained behind in charge of the wounded after the battle, there were over
20,000—of which 5,456 were Confederates too badly wounded to be taken with
Lee’s Army on their retreat—scattered about in 60 hospitals.

Janes and two others from the Medical Department located a
site about a mile east of Gettysburg on some high ground overlooking the town that
afforded several advantages. It had a spring of good water, trees for shade, a
frequent breeze, and perhaps most importantly, the railroad which curved to
within walking distance of the hospital so that when they were well enough, the
wounded could be placed on a train for home. Mr. George Wolf owned the farm
upon which “Wolf’s Woods” was located. It was popular among locals as a picnic
area. Coco indicates that Wolf’s house or woods may also have been used as a
hospital area during the battle, since there were already six Confederate
burials on the site.

Established on July 20, 1863, the site was named Camp
Letterman after the Medical Director of the Army of the Potomac, Jonathan
Letterman. By this time some 16,000 wounded had been sent off to hospitals in
Washington, or those closer to their homes, leaving 4,217 occupants of the new
General Hospital to be cared for by surgeons, orderlies and volunteer nurses.

Camp Letterman, according to Coco, was the first of its kind
actually sited on a battlefield. When fully operational there were more than
400 tents in six double rows, ten feet apart with each tent holding up to ten
patients. Come autumn each was heated with a woodstove.

By the end of August, 1,600 patients remained at Camp
Letterman. Each medical officer had forty to seventy patients under his care;
by the end of October some 300 wounded remained; two weeks into November, only
100.

Typical for the era, a large number died two to three weeks after the battle as they succumbed to infection. They were taken to the Camp Letterman graveyard south of the hospital tents. Part of the graveyard may have been located on the Daniel Lady Farm, now owned and overseen by the Gettysburg Battlefield Preservation Association.

[image error]Daniel Lady Farm

Coco quotes from a letter by a Pennsylvania militiaman on
October 26 who writes that the tents (and their “streets”) take up about 80
acres. He mentions that as many as seventeen die per day, are mostly
Confederates and are buried in the field south of the camp. Amputated limbs are
put in barrels, buried in the ground, and when decomposed, are exhumed and sent
to the Medical College in Washington. Near the graveyard is a tent they call
“The Dead House” where bodies are embalmed before they are buried.

Sophronia Buckland, a nurse, wrote four years after the war that the cemetery eventually held 1,200 bodies, of which two-thirds were Confederates, although her estimate is probably too large. Glen Hayes of the Gettysburg Battlefield Preservation Association said that of the approximately 4,000 treated at Letterman, 365 died and were presumably buried in the graveyard.

What became of that graveyard is a bit of a mystery. One
assumes that after the closing of Letterman on November 20, 1863, the bodies of
the Union soldiers (and only the
Union soldiers) were exhumed and taken to the newly consecrated National
Cemetery on Cemetery Hill in Gettysburg.

I recently found evidence of Confederate soldiers being removed from the graveyard, as in the case of Lieutenant James M. Manley of the 1st Tennessee Infantry. Wounded on July 3, 1863, with fractures in both the right arm and right thigh, he was captured and sent to Camp Letterman in August where he died. He was listed as buried at the Letterman burial ground. More importantly, his body was listed as exhumed from the 3rd row, grave 12, and sent to Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia.

According to Gerard A. Patterson in Debris of Battle: The Wounded of Gettysburg, the first of the Confederate bodies shipped to Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia occurred in June 1872, with the final shipment to Hollywood on October 11, 1873, totaling 2,935 remains. Perhaps this means the bodies of the Confederate dead remained in the Camp Letterman graveyard for nine or ten years after the battle.

Directions to Camp
Letterman: Head out Route 30 East. Turn right into the Giant Shopping
Center and take the second left past the Giant gas station. Follow to end of
parking lot and park near the plaques and benches.

[image error]Camp Letterman Plaques in Giant Grocery Store Parking Lot

Urban sprawl has taken over much of Camp Letterman, but
preservationists managed to erect informational plaques in a little “park” at
the Northeast corner of the parking lot for the Giant Grocery Store. It is far
enough away from the cars and road to allow gathering of EVP.

Some of the graveyard is suspected to be on part of the Daniel Lady Farm. With permission, my paranormal investigative team, including a medium, visited the site. Through electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) I got responses to questions including a name sounding like “Jacob Voos.” One of the medium’s first questions (years before I found Lt. Manley’s story) was “Are you from Tennessee?” As well, her impressions were of the smell of cooking cabbage—something we discovered later was used to feed the wounded. She also saw strange ditches, which she thought seemed out of place until I read an account from Nurse Sophronia Bucklin who visited the site after it was closed and all the tents removed: “I looked on that great field so checkered with the ditches that had drained it dry….”

A visit with a second medium on August 16, 2007, also
references excavations: “a field with holes being dug.  I see holes and water—lots of holes and
water all over the field.” Also: “I have viewed this field at night and during
the day, and I have not seen a battle, but I do see activity at both times. There
are 3 large campfires and 2-3 smaller ones.  I see small structures or obstacles and I can’t determine
what they are—piles of supplies? 
Maybe tents?  Piles of dead
too, and injured soldiers.”

Mark’s Camp Letterman EVP

Listen for a very quiet “Jacob Vous” after 25 seconds. Also, some
interesting noises after “What state are you from?” and “Who’s your president?”