Farms at Gettysburg: The Fields of Battle-Selected Images from the Adams County Historical Society

Compiled by Timothy H. Smith
Illustrated, softcover, 55 pp., 2007. The Adams County Historical Society, P. O. Box 4325, Gettysburg, PA 17325, $9.95 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Blake Magner
Blake A. Magner is the Book Review Editor of Civil War News. He makes his living as an editor, writer, cartographer and photographer of Civil War history. He is author of At Peace With Honor: The Civil War Burials of Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Review:
Two of this reviewer's favorite things are 19th-century farms and the battle of Gettysburg. Therefore, when I heard this book was in the works I eagerly looked forward to its publication. Not surprisingly, the final product met my expectations.

Much of the fighting between July 1-3, 1863, took place on the Cumberland Township farms and properties of such Gettysburg residents as Nicholas Codori, Edward McPherson, Joseph Sherfy and Peter (Jacob) Trostle, just to name a few. The action left thousands of bodies and incredible amounts of lost or destroyed equipment, as well as burned, shelled and bloodied homes, barns and outbuildings.

This volume presents a photograph or illustration of the particular farm in question along with other pertinent information including the size of the farm, who owned the property, who lived there during the battle (farms were often being maintained by tenant farmers), what action took place on the property and how the farm changed in the years since the Civil War.

Images of many of these farms have been published over the years, but the views presented in Farms at Gettysburg have been rarely seen. Many of these images are published here for the first time. Each photograph is identified with a title, the photographer, the approximate date the image was taken and the archive containing the image. Per usual, as with most Thomas publications, the photographic reproduction is excellent.

The entire battle area is pretty well covered from where Lt. Marcellus Jones fired the "first" shot of the battle to East Cavalry battlefield, the Taneytown Road, Baltimore Pike, a brief look at the battlefield in the area of the Eleventh Corps fighting, and out the Hagerstown Road. This reviewer found the thatched-roofed barn of the Shealer family to be one of the most fascinating in the volume.

Even though the basic focus is the image (each of which is well documented), the lack of either a bibliography or index is a bit disappointing. Those familiar with the battle will find the well- researched and -written text fairly general.

Almost any source on the battle of Gettysburg or, as indicated in the Introduction, the Adams County Historical Society, will have much of the information contained in the text easily available. An index, on the other hand, would have made the volume a bit more user friendly.

Despite those two omissions, however, Farms at Gettysburg is a valuable source of information for the researcher or general reader. It looks at the battle from a different aspect, the farms that saw and experienced the fury of battle, but remain forever silent.

Proceeds from the sale of this volume go to the Adams County Historical Society. I strongly recommend it for readers interested in farms, Gettysburg and one of the not often looked at aspects of the battle.