Gettysburg Women’s Memorial

The first time I laid eyes on the historic Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg, I fell in love with the place. Not just because of its history, but also the picturesque countryside and the friendly people I met there. I’ve always said I could live there quite happily, and maybe in my next life I will.

Anybody who has visited Gettysburg knows all about the terrible Civil War battle that raged there from July 1-3, 1863. When wandering around the old downtown area, where buildings are still pockmarked by bullets and cannon shells, or exploring the battlefield, you can literally feel the history in the air. I’ve been to Gettysburg several times and still have not been able to see everything there is to see there. It seems like everywhere you turn there is a monument to the units who served in the battle, both North and South, and statues of soldiers engaged in combat.

But away from the battlefield itself, pastoral Evergreen Cemetery holds the graves of decades of townspeople as well as soldiers who fought and died during the 1863 battle. Though the exact location is not known, it’s speculated that it was in the cemetery where Abraham Lincoln gave his famous Gettysburg Address. Among the notables laid to rest in the cemetery is Elizabeth Thorn, one of the unsung heroes from those days.

A German immigrant, Elizabeth’s husband, Peter, was the caretaker of the cemetery beginning in 1855. The couple lived in the cemetery’s gatehouse and life must have seemed fairly normal at first. But then the Civil War began, and the town of Gettysburg was a strategic location coveted by both Union and Confederate forces.

Peter Thorn enlisted in the Union Army’s 138th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment in August of 1862, and when he went off to war, 30 year old Elizabeth was left in charge of both the cemetery and their three young sons. She was six months pregnant when the Battle of Gettysburg took place.

Leaving her home, Elizabeth fled with her sons to a safe location until the fighting was over. She returned on July 7^th to a place she couldn’t recognize. The dead and wounded from the battle, along with the carcasses of horses and mules, littered the countryside and the streets in town. In her absence, Union General Oliver Howard had used the Thorn house as his headquarters as well as a hospital. The building had been heavily damaged during the battle, much of the Thorn family’s possessions had been destroyed or stolen, and the furniture that remained was soaked in blood from the dead and dying soldiers.

Her belly swollen with child, Elizabeth Thorn went to work caring for the wounded and burying the dead while trying to feed her sons and keep them well. Diseases like dysentery, pneumonia, typhoid fever, and malaria were running rampant through the countryside, and it is estimated that twice as many people died from illness as did in the battle itself.

Undaunted by the summer heat and the carnage around her, Elizabeth and her elderly father buried somewhere around one hundred soldiers, though the exact number will never be known. With that grim task finally over, she remained in charge of the cemetery until her husband returned from the Army in 1865.

On November 1st, 1863, she gave birth to a daughter whom, she named Rose Meade Thorn. The little girl was sickly throughout her life, something Elizabeth felt was because of all the hardship and physical work she had been forced to endure while carrying the child. Rose died at the age of fourteen. Elizabeth herself declined in health, and never fully regained her strength after the war.

For many years there was no official recognition of the sacrifices she had made and the work she had done to tend to the wounded and bury the battle’s dead. She never received any compensation for what she had done. Only later in her life did stories about her activities after the battle become public knowledge.

In spite of her poor health, Elizabeth lived to be 74 years old, passing away on October 17th, 1907. She was buried in Evergreen Cemetery, along with her husband Peter. In 2002, the Gettysburg Women’s Memorial, with a bronze statue of an exhausted and pregnant Elizabeth Thorn wiping her brow as she toils in the summer heat to bury the dead, was erected in the cemetery. A fitting tribute to one of the unsung heroes of the Battle of Gettysburg.

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And finally, here’s a chuckle to start your day from the collection of funny signs we see in our travels and that our readers share with us.

Thought For The Day –Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says, “I’ll try again tomorrow.”