Military History | Observation Tower, Antietam — The First Tower Went Into the Road

Before the tower that stands here there was a shorter one, and it is underneath the road.

Work on the first began in 1895 on the high ground at the east end of the sunken lane, and stopped part way up. A War Department specification of 16 May 1896 puts it plainly: construction "was commenced in the year 1895 and the walls were carried to about the height of 16 feet, when the appropriation was exhausted and the work was stopped." A flight of wooden stairs ran to a wooden deck at the top of the stub. That specification was drawn up in order to finish it; the plan that May was to raise the rest of the tower on what was already standing.

By July the plan had changed. Blueprints from the Office of the Quartermaster General that month describe the tower now on the ground, a square shaft rising from a new footing. A typescript of 20 July 1896 has the board advertising in the Frederick News for proposals covering the tower and, in the same notice, 2,800 feet of macadamized road twelve feet wide and eight inches thick. Correspondence of 14 August 1896 between Major George W. Davis and Ezra Carman records what became of the stub: taken down, its debris used as road fill. Jacob Snyder, a Sharpsburg contractor, was excavating the new foundation on the same spot that month.

None of it reached the Secretary of War's annual report for 1896, which notes $6,683.07 spent at Antietam since the last report and "the near completion of a masonry observation tower that overlooks the whole field."

The road at the tower's foot is where the first one ended up.

📸 Cover: view west along Bloody Lane to the present observation tower, standing on the ground the 1895 stub occupied — HABS No. MD-934-A-2, Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress; no known restrictions on images made by the U.S. Government.