Gettysburg, PA - Jenny Wade

Obviously the battle of Gettysburg was not only a watershed moment in the Civil War but it was also the bloodiest battle in the history of the US. We will spent time walking the battlefield, viewing the movie and visiting the museum but I wanted to see the battle from an the view of an ordinary citizen of Gettysburg, the town which began July 1863 as a sleepy agricultural hamlet and which 4 days later was a ravaged town ringed by dead, filled with wounded and destroyed by 150,000 men of the two armies.

Jenny Wade (her name was Virginia and she was called Ginny but newspaper articles mistakenly called her Jenny) was an ordinary young woman living with her mother in the heart of Gettysburg. With both armies outside Gettysburg to the north, her mother told her to come to the house where her sister lived because ‘you’ll be safer here.’ Georgia, who had just had a baby was in bed resting during this time and Mrs. Wade was tending her. Jenny obeyed her mother right before the Confederates overran the Union positions and pushed them back through the town to the other side of the house and now the family was surrounded by Union troops and under attack by the Confederates.

Confederate sharpshooters were in attic rooms of houses below and were shooting at the Union troops around the house. Meanwhile some of the Union soldiers had come to the door asking for water and, when they smelled the bread that Jenny was baking, asked if they could have some. She willingly gave what she had and began to bake more for other Union soldiers. It is estimated that close to 150 bullets hit the house and the evidence is clear on the south wall of the house, the wall facing the Confederate line. (You can see this in the picture of the front door below.) One bullet hit the bedpost of the bed Georgia was in with her baby, bounced off and landed on the pillow. Two more hit the fireplace mantle.

On the third and last day of the battle Jenny was reading Bible verses to her family but then left to bake some more bread. Bullets hit the house and she said: ‘if anyone is to die in this house, I hope it is me.’ A bullet pierced the outside door, the inside door and hit Jenny in the back and through her heart as she was kneading dough in the bread trough.

She died immediately. Her mother went into the next room, told Georgia, Georgia screamed and 2 Union soldiers who were sharpshooting from the upstairs windows came down, covered her with the quilt from Georgia’s bed, and carried her into the basement.

They temporarily buried her body in the back yard of her sister’s house, in a coffin originally intended for a Confederate officer. In January 1864, her body was relocated to the cemetery of the German Reformed Church on Stratton Street. However, when the church wanted to expand, she was moved to the Evergreen Cemetery on Cemetery Hill, where the Union troops had their line during the battle of Gettysburg. Here President Taft proclaimed that she should have a flag flying 24-7-365.

Though there were over 50,000 casualties in the battle of Gettysburg, Jenny was the only civilian to die with battle wounds. (other civilians did die later from unexploded ordinance.)

But the story of Jenny Wade does not end there. Historians believe that she might have been secretly engaged to a young man named Jack Skelly whose photo was found in her pocket when she died. He had been fatally wounded a few weeks earlier at the battle of Winchester, VA. Before he died, however, he asked a childhood friend, Wesley Culp, who was now fighting for the Confederates to take a letter to her. Before he could get the letter to her, he also died. Jack Skelly is interred near her in Evergreen Cemetery.

But there is still more to the story. Wesley Culp was born and raised in Gettysburg and was a nephew of Henry Culp who owned a woodsy hill southeast of Gettysburg, a hill that eventually became the northern end of the Union line during the battle of Gettysburg. He got a job with a leather harness maker in Gettysburg but, in 1858, when his employer moved to (West) Virginia, he moved also. When the war broke out, he joined the Confederacy along with his new friends in his new home town. He served with Stonewall Jackson and fought in several battles of the Civil War. Meanwhile his brother, William, joined the Union and also fought in several battles, one of which was the battle of Winchester, where his regiment faced that of his brother Wesley.

After this battle, Wesley came across an old friend from Gettysburg, Jack Skelly who had been fatally wounded and asked Culp to take a letter to his fiance, Jenny Wade. When Wesley got to Gettysburg, he asked his family about Jenny and and said that he had a note from Jack to her. However, she was not in her home, but was now behind Union lines. During the battle the next day, Wesley died fighting over Culp’s Hill, the hill where he had spent so many hours as a child. Thus Wesley died before delivering Jack’s letter. One story is that his family went out to find his body and bury it on family ground, thinking that his grave would be vandalized by those who thought he was a traitor. Another is that his body was never found, only his rifle with his name on it.

Jenny Wade, Jack Skelly, Wesley Culp - all dead and forever linked in history.

‘Life is for the living.

Death is for the dead.

Let life be like music.

And death a note unsaid.’

                                                                                        Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems