150 Years Ago Tomorrow Morning
Sep. 17th, 2012 04:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
acmespaceship10-year-old Clarence Derr awoke to discover something unusual in the house; something he would never forget. I have the andirons to prove it.
You've met my great-grandpa Clarence before in this blog, as a grown man with a hobby. But now it's time to meet him as a boy born in 1851, living with his family in Frederick, MD, when the war broke out. I am guessing about their motives, but I think his parents must have decided Frederick (Barbara Fritchie, shoot if you must this old gray head and all that) was not a safe place to wait it out. So they packed up the kids and moved to a relative's farm out in the boondocks.
Funkstown, MD.
Where Nothing Ever Happens.
For those of you who are not up on Maryland geography, I'll mention here that Funkstown is just south of Hagerstown, north of Sharpsburg, and on a little creek they call Antietam.
Aside: That's a writer's affectation: the "little creek they call Antietam," "a beach called Omaha" and wording like that. Because "Antietam" is a powerful word. If you know anything at all about the Civil War (and if you don't read this) (read it anyway, good article) then "Antietam" has a meaning beyond words. Yet the creek itself is nondescript. I've seen it, and I've seen dozens just like it. The word is iconic, ringing like a bell through history, but the creek is just a creek. A good thing to remember as we live out our own lives in nondescript locations, thinking nothing important will happen here.
Family lore is silent about what Clarence might have noticed on September 17, 1862. He never mentioned it to his daughter (Helen, who had a kitten named Rastus). Having walked the area, I would think you could hear and smell the battle from Funkstown, but not very loud or very obvious. Maybe they kept the kids distracted. Or locked in the cellar which strikes me as a pretty good idea. But Clarence went to bed that night as usual, and came downstairs in the morning for breakfast to find the entire first floor of the house full of wounded soldiers (mostly Union). Their farmhouse, like many in the area, had been commandeered by the Union Army as as hospital. Clarence got put to work hauling water and carrying supplies. If he saw surgeries, witnessed deaths or attended burials, he didn't mention them later to his children.
If I recall correctly, and if the stories I was told 4th-hand are accurate, it only took a week or two for the Union to clear out of the Derrs' farmhouse. I can't imagine that any fair-sized house in the area was spared service as a hospital, supply hub or meeting place. The farmhouse was still standing in the 1920s (or maybe 1910s) when this photo was taken of Clarence visiting the place.
Clarence died in 1938. You don't have to look far to be reminded of how long ago the Civil War really wasn't. My dad remembered how, when he was a very little boy visiting his grandparents, there was an old man who sat on the porch rocker and kept his pockets full of candy for the children. Dad later found out that old man was the most-decorated cannoneer in the Confederate Army. But that's a different branch of the family.
Clarence would tell anybody who'd listen about his "Antietam" story but only the spare details, and always presenting it as a grand adventure (which, for a 10-year-old boy, it probably was). I wish I could have asked him what it was really like, and how it affected him all the rest of his life. But I suspect he could not have told me. And in his generation, lots of people had Civil War stories, many far more harrowing than his. Not worth writing down, not worth examining more closely.
I do know this: Every wagon on the farm was commandeered as an ambulance. Long afterwards, Clarence saw to it that one of those wagons was chopped up and the axles made into a set of andirons, which graced his fireplace, and Helen's after that, and my Dad's still later. Now they're in my garage because we have no working fireplace. Like so many aspects of family heritage, we keep it even when it is no longer useful. My son has been told the story and someday he will be stuck with them. Physical baggage. Who knows what the emotional baggage was, or how it may have carried forward.
This is Burnside's Bridge, a monument to collosal human stupidity. It was a whole lot easier for my dad and my son to cross it in 2001 than it was for the Union Army to cross 150 years ago today. Since then Dad has crossed the metaphorical bridge to the side where Grandpa Clarence is. We don't know what's next, but the creek keeps flowing.
You've met my great-grandpa Clarence before in this blog, as a grown man with a hobby. But now it's time to meet him as a boy born in 1851, living with his family in Frederick, MD, when the war broke out. I am guessing about their motives, but I think his parents must have decided Frederick (Barbara Fritchie, shoot if you must this old gray head and all that) was not a safe place to wait it out. So they packed up the kids and moved to a relative's farm out in the boondocks.
Funkstown, MD.
Where Nothing Ever Happens.
For those of you who are not up on Maryland geography, I'll mention here that Funkstown is just south of Hagerstown, north of Sharpsburg, and on a little creek they call Antietam.
Aside: That's a writer's affectation: the "little creek they call Antietam," "a beach called Omaha" and wording like that. Because "Antietam" is a powerful word. If you know anything at all about the Civil War (and if you don't read this) (read it anyway, good article) then "Antietam" has a meaning beyond words. Yet the creek itself is nondescript. I've seen it, and I've seen dozens just like it. The word is iconic, ringing like a bell through history, but the creek is just a creek. A good thing to remember as we live out our own lives in nondescript locations, thinking nothing important will happen here.
Family lore is silent about what Clarence might have noticed on September 17, 1862. He never mentioned it to his daughter (Helen, who had a kitten named Rastus). Having walked the area, I would think you could hear and smell the battle from Funkstown, but not very loud or very obvious. Maybe they kept the kids distracted. Or locked in the cellar which strikes me as a pretty good idea. But Clarence went to bed that night as usual, and came downstairs in the morning for breakfast to find the entire first floor of the house full of wounded soldiers (mostly Union). Their farmhouse, like many in the area, had been commandeered by the Union Army as as hospital. Clarence got put to work hauling water and carrying supplies. If he saw surgeries, witnessed deaths or attended burials, he didn't mention them later to his children.
If I recall correctly, and if the stories I was told 4th-hand are accurate, it only took a week or two for the Union to clear out of the Derrs' farmhouse. I can't imagine that any fair-sized house in the area was spared service as a hospital, supply hub or meeting place. The farmhouse was still standing in the 1920s (or maybe 1910s) when this photo was taken of Clarence visiting the place.
Clarence died in 1938. You don't have to look far to be reminded of how long ago the Civil War really wasn't. My dad remembered how, when he was a very little boy visiting his grandparents, there was an old man who sat on the porch rocker and kept his pockets full of candy for the children. Dad later found out that old man was the most-decorated cannoneer in the Confederate Army. But that's a different branch of the family.
Clarence would tell anybody who'd listen about his "Antietam" story but only the spare details, and always presenting it as a grand adventure (which, for a 10-year-old boy, it probably was). I wish I could have asked him what it was really like, and how it affected him all the rest of his life. But I suspect he could not have told me. And in his generation, lots of people had Civil War stories, many far more harrowing than his. Not worth writing down, not worth examining more closely.
I do know this: Every wagon on the farm was commandeered as an ambulance. Long afterwards, Clarence saw to it that one of those wagons was chopped up and the axles made into a set of andirons, which graced his fireplace, and Helen's after that, and my Dad's still later. Now they're in my garage because we have no working fireplace. Like so many aspects of family heritage, we keep it even when it is no longer useful. My son has been told the story and someday he will be stuck with them. Physical baggage. Who knows what the emotional baggage was, or how it may have carried forward.
This is Burnside's Bridge, a monument to collosal human stupidity. It was a whole lot easier for my dad and my son to cross it in 2001 than it was for the Union Army to cross 150 years ago today. Since then Dad has crossed the metaphorical bridge to the side where Grandpa Clarence is. We don't know what's next, but the creek keeps flowing.
