Well, still have to talk about the rest of my trip to DC! As I mentioned in the prior post, I went out with Jenny to Antietam National Battlefield and Harpers Ferry National Historic Park. Which meant , in addition to more NPS sites, going out to West Virginia for my first time ever.
Just that easy, eh?
As wikipedia puts it, Antietam “was the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, with about 23,000 casualties.” I’ve read a lot about the Civil War over the years, but growing up in California (and then briefly living in MA) didn’t really allow me much contact with any of the Civil War historical sites. This then of course starts to rectify that. The site is surrounded by farmland in Maryland, and it was an exceedingly pleasant drive out there. Once we arrived, we went to the visitors center, then did the loop drive around the main part of the park. It’s a series of fields with several markers for various events. The NPS has local farmers maintain the fields, and they’re putting up fences in the locations and styles of where there were fences during the battle.
Dunker Church
There are many many monuments at the park, put up by a variety of different groups. There are also six “mortuary cannons” marking where generals were killed. It was a beautiful day, windy and clear, and walking around to the various sites got me into a thoughtful frame of mind. We drove the tour around the park, stopping at the North Woods, the Observation Tower, and the Burnside Bridge (where we ran into a group of Boy Scouts doing a canoeing backpack trip, very nice).
It’s lush and beautiful, and thinking about it as such a deadly place is sobering.
One of the recreated fences.
At the end of the time there, we went to the Pry House, which they have set up as a Civil War medical museum. It was used as McClellan’s headquarters during the war, and has exhibits about field hospitals of the time. Apparently the Civil War was the first time they really did am ambulance corps, if I am remembering correctly. It was fascinating, and definitely worth seeing, though I am quite happy that I live in the age of modern medicine, as poor as it can sometimes seem.
After this we drove over to Harpers Ferry. The lower part of the town of Harpers Ferry is located within the National Historic Park, and is at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. The arsenal there was attacked by John Brown in a runup to the Civil War, and has always interested me. (For random sidenote, his sons later moved to California, and lived in the San Gabriel mountains just north of Pasadena). We parked in the upper lot, and took the shuttle bus down to the lower town and walked around a bit, had a bite to eat, looked at the river and some of the historical sites, and then left.
Some of the buildings in the lower town.
The rivers coming together was pretty cool, and something I hadn’t seen before. They apparently flood every so often, and there is a marker on one of the buildings noting various heights that the flood waters had come to over the years. There were also several pilings in the river noting places where bridges had once stood. We didn’t get to hike around and quite look at as much stuff as I would have liked, but that’s ok, it was still pretty great.
Had been a bridge! This is the Potomac, with the Shenandoah coming in on the right.
After that Jenny and I drove back to DC, and the next day I went out and did the Post Hunt. Jen and Roger and Clint and I ran around trying to solve some puzzles, along with a lot of other crazy people. It was a great deal of fun, if a bit drizzly, and we got a couple of them, but weren’t, in the end, any sort of winner. oh well! It was still fun to run around that part of DC, see some guys dressed up as Washington Nationals bobbleheads running a foot race, and lots of people outside with general silliness. Then, that day (I think, it still was that day) Roger took me back to the airport and I went on my merry way home, having had an awesome trip.
Trying to figure some things out, our intrepid team begins.
Presidential bobbleheads.
