Antietam National Battlefield

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Antietam National Battlefield sits along Antietam Creek in Sharpsburg, Maryland, where on the 17th of September 1862, American soldiers killed, wounded, or went missing at a combined tally of 22,717 in a single day. No day in the country's history has matched that toll. The fields lie in Washington County, near the Appalachian foothills and the Potomac River, quiet now except for the wind moving through Miller's Cornfield. What happened here, and why does the site still draw visitors more than a century and a half later? The questions ahead reach into a morning artillery bombardment, a sunken road that held four hours of desperate fighting, a bridge defended by only 500 Georgia sharpshooters, and a cemetery where more than 1,836 of the dead were buried without anyone knowing their names.

• 2. The Bloodiest Day

  ›

  Major General Joseph Hooker opened the battle at dawn with a Union artillery bombardment aimed at Confederate positions held by Major General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson in Miller's Cornfield. Hooker's infantry followed the falling shells and pushed Jackson's men from their positions. Around 7 a.m., Jackson reinforced and reversed the push, driving the Union troops back across the same ground. Major General Joseph K. Mansfield then committed his men and clawed some of it back.

  As the cornfield fighting wound down, Major General William H. French was steering his Federals toward Major General John Sedgwick's flank and stumbled instead into Confederate Major General D.H. Hill's troops, who were dug into a Sunken Road. The two sides hammered each other there for four hours before the Union finally took the road.

  On the southeast side of town, Major General Ambrose E. Burnside's IX Corps had spent the morning trying to cross Antietam Creek over a stone arch bridge, held back by only 500 Georgia sharpshooters on the heights. Around 1 p.m. they broke through, crossed what would become known as Burnside's Bridge, and pushed toward Sharpsburg. They came close enough that only the timely arrival of Major General A.P. Hill's division from Harpers Ferry stopped Burnside from entering the town. Hill's men drove the Union troops back to the heights above the bridge, and by nightfall General Robert E. Lee's army still held its ground.

  Lee pulled his forces back across the Potomac River during the night of the 18th. His first invasion of the North had ended here, and McClellan held the field without pressing the pursuit.

• 3. A Park Takes Shape

  ›

  Antietam National Battlefield Site was established on the 30th of August 1890, making it one of the earlier federally protected Civil War sites. For more than four decades it fell under the War Department, which managed it until the 10th of August 1933, when the transfer to the National Park Service took place. The site was redesignated on the 10th of November 1978 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on the 15th of October 1966. Additional documentation from a National Park Service recording effort was filed on the 27th of February 2009.

  The Visitor Center, built in 1962 as part of the Mission 66 improvement plan, houses museum exhibits on the battle and the broader Civil War. A 26-minute orientation film narrated by James Earl Jones runs on the hour and the half-hour. From the center, visitors can pick up an audio tour to accompany the self-guided 8.5-mile driving route with eleven stops across the battlefield. The park entrance fee stands at ten dollars per person for those seventeen and older, with those sixteen and under admitted free, and the fee covers three days of access.

• 4. The Cemetery's Unfinished Ledger

  ›

  Antietam National Cemetery adjoins the park on 11.36 acres and holds more than 4,976 interments. Of those, 1,836 remain unidentified. The cemetery was commissioned in 1865, and interments began in 1867 after an effort to identify the remains that succeeded in only about 40 percent of the cases. That work was never truly finished.

  Civil War burials here include only Union soldiers. The Confederate dead were taken to three separate Maryland and West Virginia cemeteries: Washington Confederate Cemetery in Hagerstown, Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Frederick, and Elmwood Cemetery in Shepherdstown. The grounds later received veterans from the Spanish-American War, both World Wars, and the Korean War, before closing to new interments in 1953.

  Two exceptions were made after that closure. In 1978, Congressman Goodloe Byron was interred here. In 2000, the remains of USN Fireman Patrick Howard Roy, killed in the attack on the USS Cole, became the second. The cemetery gatehouse carries its own architectural footnote: it was the first building designed by Paul J. Pelz, the architect who later designed the Library of Congress.

• 5. Luminaries and Preservation

  ›

  Every year on the first Saturday in December, more than a thousand volunteers carry out the Antietam Battlefield Illumination, a tradition that began in 1989. They place 23,000 luminaries in rows across the northern portion of the battlefield. Each luminary is a paper bag filled with sand holding a single candle, and each one stands for a soldier killed, wounded, or reported missing in the battle.

  Preservation of the land itself has been harder fought than that ceremony might suggest. The National Trust for Historic Preservation named Antietam National Battlefield one of America's Most Endangered Places in 1988, 1989, 1990, and 1991 in response to a proposal to build a shopping center on battlefield land. The listing drew in local, state, and federal agencies along with nonprofit organizations, and by 2017 the battlefield was cited as a preservation success story alongside ten other formerly endangered sites.

  The American Battlefield Trust, working with partners including the Save Historic Antietam Foundation, had acquired and preserved 468 acres of the overall battlefield through mid-2023. That total includes the "epicenter" tract, a 44.4-acre parcel lying between Miller's Cornfield and the Dunker Church that had been privately held. The Trust purchased the parcel, also known as the Wilson farm, in 2015 for about one million dollars. The postwar house and barn that stood on it along Hagerstown Pike have since been removed, and the land has been returned to its wartime appearance.

• 6. The Pry House and Medical Memory

  ›

  The Pry House Field Hospital Museum occupies the building that served as Union Commander General George B. McClellan's headquarters during the battle. Its exhibits focus on period medical care of the wounded and on the history of the house itself. The museum is sponsored by the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, connecting the site's military story to the often-overlooked story of how surgeons and nurses worked under fire and without modern tools to treat thousands of casualties in a single day.