Military History | War Correspondents Memorial Arch — The List Its Builder Compiled

Union troops under William B. Franklin forced Crampton's Gap late on the afternoon of 14 September 1862, one of three passes over South Mountain fought over that day. Thirty-four years later a stone arch went up in the gap, and it commemorates neither army.

George Alfred Townsend, hired by the New York Herald in 1862 at about twenty-one and writing under the name Gath, bought a hundred acres at the gap in 1884 and built an estate there. His memorial to the correspondents and artists of the war was dedicated on 16 October 1896: fifty feet high, forty broad, a horseshoe arch beside a crenellated tower of fifty-five feet, with SPEED and HEED on terracotta shields and the line Sept. 14 - 62 - 96 — the battle's anniversary and the year of the monument, not the day it was unveiled.

Two tablets on the east face carry the names. The roadside marker counts 157; the National Register nomination breaks them into 106 Union correspondents, 29 Southern names and 16 artists, six fewer. The Park Service's transcription of the tablets includes Townsend's own name, and reads "John L. Smithmeyer, Architect"; the nomination says only that most accounts ascribe the design to Townsend.

Timothy J. Reese, writing in 2003, called the roll a product of "an imprecise, word-of-mouth method of random collection" by Townsend and his news cronies. Thirty-three of the names, by his count, cannot be identified at all, and twenty-two belonged to friends, large contributors, or men Townsend wished to ingratiate himself with.

On 1 October 2003 a plaque went up for four journalists killed covering the war on terrorism — Daniel Pearl, David Bloom, Michael Kelly and Elizabeth Neuffer. Reese objected that it had been installed without formal review by the state park service or the Park Service. The arch and about two acres around it are federal ground, run as a detached tract of Antietam National Battlefield inside a Maryland state park. The older tablets have not been revised.

📸 Cover: the arch from the west; the name tablets are on the far side. Photo by Acroterion, 6 October 2024, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.