A Preservation Failure

By MARC CHARISSE

Evening Sun Editor

The big white barn stood as silent sentinel for more than 140 years.

But time had taken its toll. Only the foolishly brave would have followed in the footsteps of Gen. Custer’s troopers, out across the rotting timbers to the bales of hay still stacked near the second-story windows where the Michigan men waited to ambush the Rebel horsemen.

The massive Reliant Energy generating station looms in background, but it was still easy enough, in the middle of these pristine farm fields, to imagine it was July 2, 1863. Surrounded by open space and pastoral silence, it was easy to hear the boom of cannons and the rattle of carbines.

It was here that George Custer, a general for just three days, was nearly killed and showed his true colors as a commander. Here, in a particularly vicious clash along the Hunterstown Road, his Michigan cavalrymen helped decide the outcome of the Battle of Gettysburg.

And then it was gone.

Without warning, the historic Felty barn was torn down this month, just a few weeks before a battlefield tour that last year drew about 300 people to this little-known crossroads.

“That just takes the wind out of you,” said National Park Service ranger-historian Troy Harman, who has been studying the battle and working with preservationists to save at least some portion of the field. “I feel like a prize fighter who’s been staggered.”

The Felty barn may seem a minor casualty in the battle for historic preservation. Within a decade, most of the Hunterstown battlefield will disappear under a 2,000-home development approved for the area.

But there is still hope some portion of the field can be saved, and the old barn was the centerpiece of the battle, a symbol of the rearguard action fought by preservationists to save Hunterstown before it is too late.

Saving the farm

Posted near the old barn is a sign that reads: “Dan and Leo Keller, Adams County Conservation District, Farmer of the Year 1994.”

But much of the farm, owned by J. Felty during the Civil War, will become part of developer Rick Klein’s Gettysburg Commons.

Leo Keller doesn’t want to comment on the demise of his historic barn. The building was already falling down, he says, and he just finished the job.

Preservationists say he could have gotten an easement, grants to shore up the falling structure.

But Keller says while lots of folks made noise about saving the barn, no one ever actually came by with an offer to fix it up for him.

The preservationists say they tried. The trouble, they say, is that too many longtime locals take their historic heritage for granted. It’s a battle waged across central Pennsylvania between the reality of local agricultural economics and dreams of a national shrine to America’s collective past. So it’s no surprise that much of their support comes from Civil War and historical groups across the country.

Jackie Volkhen, of Grand Rapids, Mich., heard about the barn’s demise in an e-mail from Roger and Laurie Harding, newcomers to Hunterstown who bought the historic Tate farm four years ago and have since started a local preservation group.

Volkhen and her husband, John, are re-enactors who come to Gettysburg at least a couple of time a year and hope someday to move there.

“I was just horrified,” she says. “How much history is in that barn that’s gone now.”

She pauses before adding, “I suppose when you live in a place, you grew up there, you think, ‘Ah, that’s not a big deal.”

It wasn’t until a few years ago that the Volkhens learned of the role their local Michigan heroes played at Hunterstown from a fellow re-enactor. These days, a Hunterstown visit on the anniversary of the battle is the highlight of their annual pilgrimages.

Volkhen says she gets goose bumps when she walks the battlefield. “I get a profound sadness, that someone might have died where I’m standing. It might have been one of our Michigan boys,” she says. “I’m sad that the story is so little known.”

If more people understood what happened at Hunterstown, she says, maybe the battlefield could be saved.

Earning his spurs

Like most battles, exactly what happened at Hunterstown is surrounded with controversy.

This much is certain: Twenty-three year old George Armstrong Custer led a seemingly suicidal charge of a few dozen men down the Hunterstown Road against an enemy who was behind cover and outnumbered him.

Hemmed in by the fences on either side of the road, the troopers could only charge four abreast, a perfect target for the Rebels lined up at the Gilbert farm on the ridge to the south.

Dressed, as one of his men said, like a “circus rider gone mad,” and flashing his saber made of Toledo steel. The Boy General had his horse shot from under him and narrowly escaped death or capture when one of his men hoisted him onto his own horse as the Union troopers scurried back to the Felty farm less than a mile away.

Some historians see at Hunterstown the reckless bravery that would eventually get Custer killed at the Little Big Horn.

But ranger-historian Harman sees the battle a little differently. It was here that Custer really earned his general’s spurs.

It was the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg and the Union forces were worried about an attack on the right flank at Culp’s Hill. The cavalry had been ordered to scout the area north of the hill in search on Confederate troops.

Rebel cavalry commanded by Gen. Wade Hampton had been spotted at Hunterstown, moving south, and it was Custer’s job to find out what lay behind them.

Harman says Custer planned a careful trap.

He hid men in the barn and in the fields across the road. Behind the barn, out of sight of the Rebels, Union artillery unlimbered and got ready for the bloody work ahead.

Custer understood the impetuosity of cavalrymen; Harman says he knew if he attacked, the Rebel horsemen wouldn’t be able to resist the challenge and would chase him back down the Hunterstown Road into an ambush.

He was right.

Confederate private Wiley C. Howard remembered what happened next:

“Our command had a thrilling experience and while charging a body of cavalry down a lane leading by a barn, ran into an abuscade of men posted in the barn who dealt death and destruction upon us. Within five minutes some four or five officers were killed or wounded and about fifteen men were slain or wounded.”

Casualties were relatively light – 22 Union cavalrymen, five officers and an unknown number of enlisted men on the Confederate side killed, wounded or missing.

But Harman says the battle was important because it kept the attention of both sides focused on the northern end of the battlefield when the crucial struggle was to the south, at Little Round Top and the Peach Orchard.

The cavalry action further delayed and weakened Confederate attacks on Culp’s Hill. It also delayed the redeployment of Union cavalry to the south, leaving the Union left flank unprotected on July 2.

Harman likes to call Hunterstown, four miles north of Gettysburg, the “north cavalry field,” following the pattern of the east and south cavalry fields. He sees the seemingly separate cavalry actions from Hanover to Fairfield as unified elements, part of the big picture of the Battle of Gettysburg.

“In all of these actions, Union cavalry buffered key Union positions in four directions of the compass,” he wrote in a recent article. “Each site is equally essential to accurately portraying Gettysburg as the most famous battle for human freedom in American History.”

Eyeing opportunity

Gettysburg developer Rick Klein sees economic opportunity in the fields around Hunterstown – not just for himself but for Adams County schools and communities.

He sees opportunity for history, too.

Called Gettysburg Commons for now, the development will market itself to “active adults” without kids who will swell the tax base without crowding the schools.

And the development will be marketed with an eye on history. Streets will have Civil War names and the 25,000-30,000-foot clubhouse will house a display on the battle of Hunterstown.

“The area’s going to develop. You can’t just shut the doors and block the highways,” Klein says. “But this is very positive growth.”

Homes will be priced from the low 3’s, Klein says, and will offer working couples royal amenities like the clubhouse and outdoor ballroom. Groundbreaking on the first phase, near Routes 15 and 394, is anticipated for later this year, but it will be at least four or five years before the Hunterstown battle area is developed, he said.

Klein has already agreed to extra screening in certain critical areas and to install a wayside exhibit at the Confederate position near the Gilbert farm. Still, he would only give the state Historical and Museum Commission approved plan a “C or a D.” Klein says he’s hoping for an A in preserving the battlefield, which lies outside the National Park Boundary.

Harman – speaking for preservationists and not the National Park Service – says he hopes Klein will make three additional concessions critical to the integrity of the battlefield.

Preservationists hope development will stop short of the artillery positions on the Tate-Felty ridge. A couple of hundred feet away, at the road, they’d like to see a turnout and interpretive marker at the center of the Union line.

Finally, moving the buffer of trees from 50 to 150 feet away on the east side of the Hunterstown Road would preserve the frontage of the Michigan cavalrymen and save the central part of the battlefield.

Klein says he’s willing to consider the changes, if he and his engineers are convinced of their feasibility and importance.

He’s also willing to talk about a monument to Custer, for which the Michigan re-enactors are already raising funds.

“What they’re going to get at the end of the day,” he promises, “is going to better than they ever expected.”

Preservationist Harding says she is appreciative and hopeful, noting Klein’s company contacted the Hardings about a monument to Custer and the trooper who saved his life on the Hunterstown battlefield.