Military History | Dunker Church, Antietam — Restored or Reconstructed

On 23 May 1921 the Dunker Church was blown down in what the National Park Service's administrative history calls a terrific hail and wind storm. It had stood on the Hagerstown Pike, and on 17 September 1862 it was the focus of Union attacks on the Army of Northern Virginia's left — the day the Union army named Antietam and the Confederate one named Sharpsburg.

The ruins went up for sale and were bought by a Sharpsburg resident, Elmer G. Boyer, who salvaged the undamaged material and sold the property on. The next owner built a house on the church's foundation, and by the 1930s was running a gas station and a souvenir shop on the site. That lasted until 1951, when the Washington County Historical Society bought the ground, by then in the park's words just a foundation, and gave it to the Park Service.

The Historic American Buildings Survey recorded the salvaged woodwork before anything went up, and wrote it in the future tense: the fragments would be included in the reconstruction of the building on its original foundation.

Bids opened on 20 July 1961. The Blake Company of Hagerstown came in low at $12,884, later cut to $12,777. Victor Cushwa & Sons of Williamsport made new brick to match samples salvaged from the old, and there was enough original brick for about two thirds of one wall. The supervising architect accepted the building on 16 January 1962; it was rededicated that September.

The federal record does not agree with itself about this church. One Park Service page dates the building to 1852 and calls its builders local Dunker farmers; the Buildings Survey dates it to 1853 and calls them members of the Church of the Brethren. As for the rebuilding, the park says the church was restored, while the Service's own history of the park says reconstructed and records the 1961 contract as one to reconstruct it. Both describe the same walls, standing on the same stones.

📸 Cover: the church from the east front and north gable, whitewashed brick above a lighter stone foundation course, a bare tree, raw winter ground, a dark house beyond. Historic American Buildings Survey, HABS MD-203 photo 7, Library of Congress; no known restrictions on images made by the US Government. Second image, an undated survey copy of an earlier view of the original church under summer trees beside the road, HABS MD-203 photo 1.