At a point well forward on the foot of this shoe, Meade had his head-quarters. I tied my horse at the gate, and entered the little square box of a house which enjoys that historical celebrity. It is scarcely more than a hut, having but two little rooms on the ground-floor, and I know not what narrow, low-roofed chambers above. Two small girls, with brown German faces, were paring wormy apples under the porch; and a round-shouldered, bareheaded, and barefooted woman, also with a German face and a strong German accent, was drawing water at the well. I asked her for drink, which she kindly gave me, and invited me into the house.
The little box was whitewashed outside and in, except the floor and ceilings and inside doors, which were neatly scoured. The woman sat down to some mending, and entered freely into conversation. She was a widow, and the mother of six children. The two girls cutting wormy apples at the door were the youngest, and the only ones left to her. A son in the army was expected home in a few days. She did not know how old her children were; she did not know how old she was herself, “she was so forgetful.”
She ran away at the time of the fight, but was sorry afterwards she did not stay at home. “She lost a heap.” The house was robbed of almost everything; “coverlids and sheets, and some of our own clo’es, all carried away. They got about two ton of hay from me. I owed a little on my land yit, and thought I’d put in two lots of wheat that year, and it was all trampled down, and I didn’t git nothing from it. I had seven pieces of meat yit, and them was all took. All I had when I got back was jist a little bit of flour yit. The fences was all tore down, so that there wa’n’t one standing, and the rails was burnt up. One shell come into the house and knocked a bedstead all to pieces for me. One come in under the roof and knocked out a rafter for me. The porch was all knocked down. There was seventeen dead horses on my land. They burnt five of ’em around my best peach-tree, and killed it; so I ha’n’t no peaches this year. They broke down all my young apple-trees for me. The dead horses sp’iled my spring, so I had to have my well dug.”
I inquired if she had ever got anything for the damage.
“Not much. I jist sold the bones of the dead horses. I couldn’t do it till this year, for the meat hadn’t rotted off yit. I got fifty cents a hundred. There was seven hundred and fifty pounds. You can reckon up what they come to. That’s all I got.”
Not much, indeed!
This poor woman’s entire interest in the great battle was, I found, centred in her own losses. What the country lost or gained, she did not know nor care, never having once thought of that side of the question.
The town is full of similar reminiscences; and it is a subject which everybody except the “Copperheads” likes to talk with you about. There were heroic women here, too. On the evening of Wednesday, as our forces were retreating, an exhausted Union soldier came to Mr. Culp’s house, near Culp’s Hill, and said, as he sank down,—
“If I can’t have a drink of water, I must die.”
Mrs. Culp, who had taken refuge in the cellar,—for the house was now between the two fires,—said,—