Military History|Washington Monument, South Mountain — What They Wanted Was the Sightline

At two o'clock in the morning on 16 September 1862, the Army of the Potomac's signal detachment at Boonsborough was ordered forward toward the Antietam. One of the points already examined stood on the crest of South Mountain, and the Chief Signal Officer's report identifies it by its landmark rather than its merits: "the high peak of the Blue Ridge north of the gap known as Washington monument, which overlooks all the valley between the North and South Mountains." A station was established there. What the officers wanted was the sightline.

The tower was not in good repair. Boonsboro's citizens had raised it on 4 July 1827, most of the way in a single day's work and to its full thirty feet on a later day that autumn — Maryland's park service says September on its website and autumn on the marker at the site. The nomination that placed the monument on the National Register in 1972 calls the structure deteriorated by the time the signal officers reached it.

Two days before the station opened, while the gaps below were being fought over, a Confederate artillery officer took a party up toward what looked like a lookout on the summit. The Civil War Trails marker records what he found: local people, watching. Federal signalmen came afterward, and again in July 1863 during the Gettysburg pursuit, when the Official Records note a detail sent up to cut away timber that was blocking the view.

What stands on Monument Knob is a reconstruction. The Odd Fellows rebuilt the tower in 1882 and it fell again; the Civilian Conservation Corps finished the present one for a dedication on 4 July 1936. Appalachian Trail hikers pass the door.

📸 Cover: The Washington Monument, Washington Monument State Park, Boonsboro, Maryland, 2 September 2023 — photo by Zeete, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. The tower shown is the 1936 reconstruction, not the structure the signal officers used.