Antietam Markers Update

For the three people who occasionally browse by my blog, I’ve been tardy with updates, what with the day job getting in the way. What free time I’ve had since the weekend was devoted to uploading Antietam markers. You can see the “march down Cornfield Avenue” with periodic additions to the site, show off the RSS feed to the right.

Right now I can claim progress. About 90 plus markers or monuments are in the system, out of my estimate of 400 (including the National Park Service interpretive markers). There are just over 100 that I either haven’t documented (and happily will venture to Sharpsburg again to complete) or are physically missing.

The later has my thoughts. There’s got to be a story behind some of these. For instance, the War Department posted several tablets outside Shepherdstown, near Pack Horse Ford in the 1890s. A couple remain. References dating to the 1960s annotate the rest as “missing.” So this isn’t a recent occurrence. What happened here? Flood? Removed due to inaccurate content? Motor vehicle crash? Ghost of A.P. Hill? Who knows?

At any rate, the Cornfield Avenue set is going nicely. The base set will be lumped into a geographic relation (as was done with the Sunken Road). Then will be groupings by divisional assignments (Hood’s Division, DH Hill’s Division, Ricketts’ division, etc.). After that, I’ll start looking at state by state groupings for the monuments. Another swipe I’ve thought of is, given the confusing nature of the morning phase of the battle, is a phase by phase grouping. Might not be useful, as the markers are often roadside instead of at the point of action. We’ll see how it breaks out first.

UPDATE: The base collection for Cornfield Avenue is complete. Again a geographic grouping for now. Strictly, what you would see if you were to walk from tour stop four back to tour stop three, down Cornfield Avenue.