Battery B, 1st Maryland Light Artillery

In the summer of 1861, in prosperous Port Deposit, men volunteered for an artillery battery to fight for their beloved Union. Cant. Alonzo Snow led the approximately 155-man unit. Organized in September, Snow's Battery left the Eastern Shore in May 1862 to join the army in Virginia for the Peninsula Campaign. Lt. Theodore Vanneman wrote home complaining about the lack of action: "Was in hopes we could have gotten to Yorktown before the rebels left, but it seems we are too late. The war will be over and I shan't get to see a rascally rebel in uniform." Vanneman and his comrades soon saw plenty of Confederates. Over the next three years, Snow's Battery served in the Seven Days' Battles and the Antietam Campaign, at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, New Market, Piedmont, and Lynchburg, and in the 1864 Shenandoah Valley campaigns.



Of all the battles, Antietam made the deepest impression. Vanneman wrote that on September 17, 1862, Snow's Battery arrived on the field "just in time to drive the rebels back with slaughter. All around us their dead bodies lie. You cannot move in any way but what you will see them. Such a site I never want to see again. The cries of the wounded and dying cannot help but melt the hardest heart. One poor rebel I had given water to a number of times, called out to me in the middle of the night. How
he fares now I do not know." Today, a memorial honoring Snow's volunteers is located in an Antietam cornfield.



(captions)



(bottom left photo) Reunion, Snow's Battery, Port Deposit, 1900 - Courtesy of Historical Society of Cecil County



(top left photo) Capt. Alonzo Snow, the superintendent of the Susquehanna Canal, was 54 years old when he began leading the battery. After the war, he served as Port Deposit's postmaster. - Courtesy of Historical Society of Cecil County



(top right photo) Lt. Theodore Vanneman. His letters and those of other battery members, as well as Snow's possessions, are housed at the Paw Paw Museum in Port Deposit. - Courtesy of Historical Society of Cecil County

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Show me all markers in:  Port Deposit, MD  |  Cecil County  |  21904  |  Maryland  |  United States of America

Snow's Battery
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