Abraham Brian was a free Black man who owned this farm near where Pickett’s Charge ended on the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg on July 3, 1863. The house is tiny. It is where Abraham, his third wife, and two of his children all lived. The farm only consisted of twelve acres, but it was the family of four’s main sustenance at the time of the Civil War. The farm is next to Ziegler’s Grove.
Abraham Brian (sometimes spelled “Bryan”) was born in 1807. His parents were slaves in Maryland. He was illiterate but he was able to purchase his farm in 1857. The Bryan family fled the property in 1863 as the Confederate Army approached Gettysburg. On July 3, Pettigrew’s Confederate Division attacked the Union II Corps forces on Brian’s farm.
When Brian and his family returned home, they found their crops destroyed, their animals gone, and their house and barn riddled with bullets. There were also more than one hundred graves buried in shallow pits on his property. The family gave up trying to restore the farm after the Civil War and Abraham worked in a hotel in the City of Gettysburg. In 1879 he died and is buried in the Lincoln Cemetery, an African American resting place nearby.
By the 1890s, Brian’s name was frequently spelled “Bryan.” By that time, Abraham Brian was dead.
In the 1950s, the original Brian House was taken down and a reproduction of it as it looked in 1863 was put up by the National Park Service.
When Confederate troops began slipping west and north of the Union army for their June 1863 invasion of Pennsylvania, no one worried more about the prospect of Robert E. Lee’s men arriving in Gettysburg , Pennsylvania, than the hundreds of Blacks who had sought shelter in the region. Gettysburg was only a dozen miles north of the line dividing the free and slave states, and Gettysburg along with towns to the west like Chambersburg and Greencastle were the first free towns people escaping slavery arrived in.
Nearly 2,000 blacks lived in the area, many of whom were born free in the North. While blacks had lived in Gettysburg for almost as long as whites, the first African Americans were brought there as slaves.
In mid-June of 1863, Confederate cavalryman Albert Jenkins led his troopers into Chambersburg and soon his men were “scouring the fields for negroes. Many were caught and some, freed and slave, were bound and sent under guard South. Some escaped and some were captured from their guards by citizens of Greencastle” and freed, according to one resident. Another recalled that the Confederates kidnapped“all of [the people of color] they could find even little children” for sale in the slave market in Richmond. Cavalrymen threatened to burn the houses of whites sheltering escaped slaves. One farmer reported seeing four wagon loads of black women and children being shipped south. [Gettysburg: The Last Invasion by Allen C. Guelzo published by Knopf (2013) Kindle loc. 1711-1720; Reminiscences of the War by Jacob Hoke published by Foltz (1884) p. 38.]
The reasons why a busy army in the midst of a major invasion would capture slaves when it seemingly should have been preparing for battle were threefold. First, slaves were valuable commodities. Blacks shipped south could fetch as much as $40,000 in modern U.S. dollars. Second, many Confederates viewed escaped slaves as thieves who had stolen themselves from their white “owners.” They had a strong impulse to punish the blacks. Third, in order to undermine the Emancipation Proclamation, the Confederate government had endorsed a policy of kidnapping blacks to demonstrate to slaves that they would not be securely free if they ran away to the Union lines.
According to the marker at the site:
“His property … was thus under fire of the enemy and the very midst and thickest of the battle”
-damage claim of Abraham Brian
In 1863, this was the home and farm of Abraham Brian. He and James Warfield, who owned a farm and blacksmith shop near Seminary Ridge, were among a small, unique group of farmers on the battlefield. They were free black men, and they were property owners.
When the Confederate army invaded Pennsylvania during the summer of 1863, Brian and his family left the area. On July 2, Union soldiers occupied Brian’s farm and home. They dismantled his fences to build breastworks, and trampled his crops. Heavy fighting raged around the farm, particularly on July 3 during the Pickett-Pettigrew Charge, exposing the home and buildings to musketry and shell fire.
Following the battle, Brian returned to begin repairs on his farm. Like nearly all the area farmers he filed claims (with the federal government) for damages. Out of $1028 requested, he received $15. Many farmers received nothing.
The damage inflicted by the battle did not discourage or ruin Brian. He rebuilt his 12-acre farm and prospered until his death in 1879.
From the caption to the photo and drawing on the bottom right:
In mid-July, 1863 photographer Mathew Brady visited the battlefield and recorded images of Brian’s farm. They provide a photographic record of the farm as Abraham Brian would have seen it upon his return.
His farmhouse (left) displays battle damage, while behind the house are the rails and stones of his fencing, which Union soldiers piled for protection.
This etching (above) by John B. Bachelder shows Union infantry men using Brian’s stone wall and buildings for protection during the Pickett-Pettigrew Charge on July 3.
While the interiors of the Brian House were not original to the property, they do reflect the type of furnishings used at the time.
According to historian David Smith, not all Confederates could carry out the re-enslavement and forced return migration. A letter written by Confederate Colonel William Christian says that “We took a lot of Negroes yesterday [June 27]. I was offered my choice, but…my humanity revolted at taking the poor devils.” He said he turned loose those he could. Christian was not typical, however. One Confederate wrote home talking about soldiers “capturing negroes and horses.” Another soldier said that after Lee’s victory his men would return to the town of Greencastle to “take off every neager.”
Above is the hand-pumped well.
This site has long been a place for visitors to gather, not to hear about Gettysburg’s African American refugees, but to photograph a place immortalized in 1938 when Confederate and Union veterans extended hands across Brian’s wall symbolizing the reconciliation of Northern and Southern whites. No Blacks appear in the photo.
However, in the background you can seen Brian’s barn and to the right of the barn is Brian’s house.
All color photos taken by Pat Young.
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Source:
I used the Civil War Institute video on the Bryan House for some information.
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