Military History|Fox's Gap, South Mountain — The Fifty-Eight in the Well

The fighting at Fox's Gap on 14 September 1862 lasted a day. Disposing of what it left took three, and the story that grew out of those three days has outlived almost every other fact about this ground.

As it is usually told, a Union burial detail dropped a Confederate body down Daniel Wise's well, and Wise then contracted with the army at a dollar a head to take fifty-seven more. That account first reached print in 1882, in a regimental history by Charles Walcott, who had left the mountain before the burials and had the story at second hand.

Steven Stotelmyer, who has worked this ground with the Central Maryland Heritage League, reads the record differently. Wise had taken his family off the mountain on the morning of the battle and was not present. The men who filled the well were soldiers — Private Samuel Compton of the 12th Ohio, who watched them, wrote that they could only get through it drunk. A register of Confederate graves compiled for the state in 1869, which Stotelmyer cites, lists fifty-eight unknown men at Wise's Well, forty-seven more on the east side of the farm and twenty-three on the west.

In 1874 a contractor lifted them and carried them to Hagerstown. In 2002 an excavation directed by Stotelmyer, with archaeologists from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and the National Park Service, found a stone-lined shaft and what may be the cabin's foundation wall, and no remains.

Ten acres south of the Reno Monument belong to the Heritage League now, and the field is kept to something near its 1862 shape. Visitors are welcome to walk it. Relic hunting on it is forbidden.

📸 Cover: Fox's Gap looking north-east toward Turner's Gap (Acroterion, 17 April 2011, CC BY-SA 4.0).