Houses of Worship Become Houses of Misery

— Antietam Campaign 1862 —

Union surgeons turned Burkittsville, a quiet rural village of some 200 people, into a hospital complex after the September 14, 1862, Battle of Crampton's Gap. The building in front of you, the German Reformed Church, was Hospital D.

Twenty-year-old Henrietta Biser gasped when she saw the church pews strewn in the front yard and "a pile of amputated limbs lying just inside the door of the church. Blood was running...over the floor...and things were torn to pieces." Henry M. Wiener remembered amputations being conducted in the church and "seeing blood on...the walls of the church." Wounded Union and Confederate soldiers lay on the floor, their seeping blood ruining the carpet, until straw was brought in. When it became soaked, it was pitched outside and replaced with cots.

The red brick St. Paul's Lutheran Church also served as a hospital, and the Reformed Church parsonage, which stood between the churches, may also have served a medical function. The Henry McDuell farm north of town was Hospital A.

The hospitals operated until January 1863, when the remaining patients were transferred to Frederick. The soldiers who died in Burkittsville were temporarily interred in the town cemetery. The Federals were removed to the Antietam National Cemetery in 1867 and the Confederates to Hagerstown's Washington Confederate Cemetery in the 1870s.

Hospital D stands as a reminder of the misery and destruction the Antietam Campaign brought into the heart of this quiet town.

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Show me all markers in:  Burkittsville, MD  |  Frederick County  |  21718  |  Maryland  |  United States of America

Confederate Forces
Burkittsville: Henry Burkitt's Town
Chew's Ashby Artillery
"Sealed With Their Lives"
Gath's Empty Tomb
Mausoleum
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Brownsville Pass: Semmes' Gamble
Troup Light Artillery
Padgett's Field: Confederate Last Stand

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