Most students of the American Civil War associate the Spangler family with Gettysburg. As a kid my parents took me to Spangler Spring so I could see the water that had refreshed Union and Confederate soldiers during the hot days of early July, 1863. Over the years I have visited Gettysburg more than a dozen times and I have been surprised at the number of sites that bear the “Spangler” name throughout the city and countryside. In fact, there were many members of the Spangler family living in Gettysburg and in the farms outside of Gettysburg in Adams County. At least five farms were owned by the Spanglers in 1863, including the area known as Herbst Woods where General Reynolds was shot down. The Herbst farm was owned by a member of the Herbst family, but his wife was a Spangler.
When I went to Gettysburg in the 20th Century, the Spangler Farm off of Granite Schoolhouse Lane was still a private residence and it would remain so until 2008 when the property was taken over by the Gettysburg Foundation. The Foundation purchased the 80 acre property along with the buildings on it. The barn and the Spangler house had been used as a hospital for the XI Corps during and immediately after the battle. Some of the land was also used as the II Corps hospital. In between the two hospitals was where the Army of the Potomac’s Artillery Reserve encamped during most of the battle.
The Spangler Farm and Hospital is currently open only one day each week, on Saturdays during the summer. You must sign-up for a timed reserve ticket, which is free in 2025, to visit. Go to the website to find out how to reserve your ticket. After August 9, 2025 this admission system may well change.
I went to the Spangler Farm in the afternoon. The road there was an original road that existed during the time of the battle called Granite Schoolhouse Lane. At the corner where the Schoolhouse Lane intersects the road to the farm there is a monument to Union General Winfield Scott Hancock and Confederate General Lew Armistead. Both were wounded during Pickett’s Charge with the Confederate being treated at the XI Corps hospital and Hancock being treated on Granite Schoolhouse Lane. They were old army friends and they were receiving care just a few hundred yards from each other on July 3, 1863, although neither of them knew of this.
The barn was impressive when I first saw it from nearly a quarter mile away. To the left, I could see the Spangler house and several outbuildings. But, there were nearly 2,000 wounded, including 100-200 Confederates, at the XI Corps hospital and most were not inside any structure at all. Most were laid exposed on the fields around the buildings. Many did not even have a tent to protect them from the sun of the three day battle or the heavy rains that came down on them on July 4.
To familiarize myself with the history of the site I used the book “Too Much for Human Endurance” The George Spangler Farm Hospitals and the Battle of Gettysburg by Ronald D. Kirkwood. This volume gives a complete history of the site and a description of its architecture. It covers the care for General Francis Barlow, General Hancock, and Confederate Lew Armistead, but it also gives details about the medical care administered to enlisted men from the Xi and II Corps who suffered here.
The building is called a “Bank Barn” which refers to the upper part of the barn hanging beyond the foundation. This creates an area which is open to the air but protected from the sun and rain, making it perfect for the surgeons to ply their trade doing amputations. While amputations may seem to be an atrocious practice, at the time they were the best way to save the life of an soldiers whose bones were shattered. Many soldiers who had a seemingly non-essential wound in the wrist or a finger would refuse an amputation but in a few days the area would become so infected that his life was lost.
Next to the barn is the Spangler house. George Spangler was 47 years old when the war came to Gettysburg. He was a member of the schoolboard, a lifelong Democrat, and a well-respected farmer. His father, Abraham, owned the farm where Spangler’s Spring is. George’s wife was Elizabeth Brinkerhoff who was 44 at the time of the battle. They had four children who were between 14 years old and 21 years old in 1863. While six people lived in the house, it only has two bedrooms. During the battle and its aftermath, the Spanglers lived in one room. The rest of the house was used by the medical staff of the XI Corps to coordinate medical services. Patients would also find shelter in the house.
One account of the death of General Lew Armistead says that he was placed in one of the upstairs bedrooms where he died. Most historians say that the evidence does not support this as the place where he died. However, he likely died just a short distance from the house.
When you go on a Saturday, even though this was a place of suffering and the docents will tell you about the pain the patients went through, please remember that the majority left this site alive due to the care taken by the surgeons, the nurses, the hospital stewards, and volunteers from the local community and the Christian and Sanitary commissions.
Below is my picture before I went with a guide to explore the site.
As you can see in the photo below, the “bank” on the right side of the barn shows a considerable shelter from the rain and snow. This was where most amputations at the site took place.
When I got to the barn, I found out that I was lucky to have noted historian of the Civil War Professor Carol Reardon of Penn State University as my guide. She has written the outstanding modern history of Pickett’s Charge. It was appropriate to have her at the site, since many Confederate artillery shell fired at Cemetery Ridge on July 3, 1863 landed just a few yards short of the barn.
Most of the docents are volunteers, some of who were involved in the restoration of the site. I was at the Civil War Institute and Professor Reardon was kind enough to take us around. One thing she pointed out was that most of the wounded were not in the barn, they were in the fields on the right of the picture.
The other side of the barn.
Next to the place where I took the above photo, I found out that there was “Witness Tree” next to this site. A “Witness Tree” is a tree that existed at the time of the battle.
Professor Reardon took us inside the barn. While some of the wood is modern to replace rotted out sections, there are many areas where original woodwork and nails are still there.
While the structure was not designed as a hospital, the staff of the XI Corps used the drying racks for grain as a place where uniforms and sheets could be dried.
Carol Reardon did an excellent job of using the physical evidence of the structure to explain what went on here.
Places in the barn reinforced with stone were used to protect vital stores and to safeguard patients.
Captain Alfred Lee from Ohio reports on seeing the XI Corps hospital:
“We were hurriedly carried to the ambulances and driven to a field-hospital established in a large barn a mile or more from Gettysburg. In and around that barn were gathered about fifteen hundred wounded soldiers, Union and Confederate. They were begrimed, swollen, and bloody, as brought in from the field, and, for the most part, had received as yet but little surgical treatment. Some were barely alive, others had just died, and many were in a state of indescribable misery. In the centre of the barn stood an amputating table, around which two or three surgeons were busily performing their dreadful offices. “A handsome young German captain, whose leg had been shattered by a musket-ball, was placed upon the table and chloroformed. After the operation of removing his injured limb was complete, he was brought to where I lay and placed beside me. The pallor of his face betokened great loss of blood and extreme weakness. After some minutes, he opened his eyes, and, turning languidly toward me, inquired, ‘Is my leg off?’ Being told that it was, he gazed intently at his hand, and, observing that a ring had been removed from his finger, he remarked, ‘I would not care for this, were it not for a little friend I have down there at Philadelphia.’ He could not say much more, for his remaining vitality was fast ebbing away. In a few hours it was gone.”
From: Kirkwood, Ronald D.. “Too Much for Human Endurance”: The George Spangler Farm Hospitals and the Battle of Gettysburg (p. iv). Savas Beatie. Kindle Edition.
Every part of the barn was filled with men.
While many tourists consider the XI Corps “The German Corps” nearly half of the men in it were native born or from other countries like Ireland. However, a sizeable number of patients at the hospital only spoke German. Luckily, many German immigrant doctors joined the German units inside the Corps. The patients were also helped by a German Lutheran minister sent by the Christian Commission. He served their religious needs, helped comfort those approaching death, and wrote home to the families of those who died in their native German.
They have a display of temporary wooden headstones that were put over the graves of the patients that died. Reardon said that these were men who were buried around the hospital.
Professor Reardon took us behind the home to look at the Orchard. This was replanted on the site that was used as an orchard in 1863 which produced apples and pears. She said that patients were buried in the Orchard because they would not be disinterred by farmers plowing a field. The staff noted where the patients were buried and what their name and unit were. Within a few months the bodies were disinterred and reburied at the National Cemetery not too far away.
Brigadier General Francis Barlow commanded a brigade of the XI Corps on July 1, 1863. Against his orders he moved his men in front of the rest of the Union line up to what is now called Barlow’s Knoll. This was the focal point of the Confederate attack on the Union right. Barlow was shot three times by the advancing Confederates and after briefly being examined by Confederate doctors he was told that his wound was mortal. When the Confederates retreated on July 4th, Barlow was rescued and taken to the XI Corps hospital. Many historians believe that he was cared for inside the Spangler house. Against all odds, Barlow pulled through and later went on to resume his military duties.
Barlow was one of the handful of general given their commission while still in their early twenties. I have a particular interest in his story because he was the son of the second minister of the Brooklyn Unitarian Church where my wife attends services.
The house has been restored to how it looked in 1863. Later additions were removed. The stone and woodwork were restored, and non-historical outbuildings were removed. In the photo below to the right of the house is a smokehouse used to preserve meat. This is a reconstruction of the original smokehouse which was taken down when the Foundation acquired the property.
The building today is in very good shape after the restoration.
The care at the hospital was heavily influenced by Dr. Jonathan Letterman who helped introduce standardized care for soldiers. After the First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas), wounded were so mistreated under the incipient medical care that many of them died needlessly. On July 4, 1862 Letterman took command of medical personnel for the Army of the Potomac. He professionalized the ambulance system, taught doctors how to triage incoming cases. regularized the allocations of medicines and supplies to the different treatment centers and set up both immediate care centers right behind the fighting army and created the Corps hospitals further behind the lines. In Gettysburg he set up a master hospital after the battle to treat seriously injured patients who could not be discharged which was open until November of 1863. Much of the success of the Spangler Farm hospital was due to the reforms he made over the previous year.
Next to the house is a building called the Summer Kitchen. Many families built a Summer Kitchen apart from the main house so that the preparation of food in July and August would not raise temperatures in the living quarters. Historians now believe that the Spangler house had no kitchen during the first decades that the family lived there, and so the “Summer Kitchen” was used year-round.
Outside the Summer Kitchen is a plaque noting that Lewis Armistead died in the Summer Kitchen.
While many tourists at Gettysburg who have seen the movie “Gettysburg” believe that Armistead died on the field at Gettysburg after the repulse of Pickett’s Charge, in fact the general was taken to the XI Corps hospital. Armistead had received two non-fatal wounds and he received treatment for them, but either a spreading infection or a blood clot killed him on July 5.
You can go inside the Summer Kitchen both to see how it was used to house the wounded and to understand the women’s work of providing meals for their families.
The interior is set up to show a non-military food preparation.
While you are unlikely to be on a tour of Spangler farm led by Carol Reardon, this is still a good place to learn about the immediate care of wounded soldiers after they were removed from the battlefield. You can also see where General Armistead died and where Generals Hancock and Barlow were treated.
Also, as we learned, the Army of the Potomac’s Artillery Reserve occupied the fields between the Spangler hospital and the Granite School House hospital. This unit had nearly half of all of the artillery of the Army of the Potomac. Units moved out from here as emergencies developed and on July 3, there was a rush to Cemetery Hill from here as the Confederate bombardment tried to soften up Union defenders. So this site was not just a hospital, it also served the artillery.
All color photos are by Pat Young.
To see more sites Pat visited CLICK HERE
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