Military History | Cornfield Avenue, Antietam — Without Praise and Without Censure

On 2 March 1895 Congress told the War Department how to word a battlefield. The sundry civil appropriation act of that day granted $9,421 for Antietam, called Sharpsburg in Confederate accounts, and directed that the positions held by both armies be marked "with tablets, each bearing a brief historical legend compiled without praise and without censure" (28 Stat. 950).

The board doing the work had been built along the same line. In August 1891 the Secretary of War appointed Colonel John C. Stearns of Vermont, who had served in the Union Army, and Major General Henry Heth of Virginia, who had served in the Confederate Army. They wrote to state governors and to survivors listed by the Pension Office; delegations came from Massachusetts and North Carolina, with more promised from Maryland, Virginia and Texas. Their reports explain that the Confederate line was fixed first for an evidentiary reason: an army on the defensive "may be more easily located".

Who drafted the legends the board's papers never say. In November 1894 Major George B. Davis reported only that "the legends for a great many of them have already been prepared". The plates were cast in Chattanooga and painted black, the raised lettering picked out in white. The board's final report of 1898 counted 213 historical tablets at Antietam and predicted that "with occasional repainting at small expense they will endure for centuries".

Cornfield Avenue was built in 1896 to carry them: half a mile of new road running from the ground held by the Confederate left, across the Hagerstown Pike and the "Bloody Cornfield", to the Smoketown Road "which was traversed by the Union advance". Tablet No. 81 stands on its north side, reporting that Ricketts' division engaged a line 220 to 230 yards in its front and was compelled to retire after a contest of thirty to forty minutes. Since 2016 park volunteers have been lifting the plates off their stands, stripping them and repainting the letters white.

📸 Cover: War Department historical tablet No. 81, on the north side of Cornfield Avenue at Antietam National Battlefield; photograph by Doug Kerr, 17 October 2011, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Second image, tablets Nos. 53 and 116 with standing corn on the ridge behind; same photographer, date and licence.