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The unassuming stone farmhouse occupied by John and Ann Rose and their seven children sat amid 230 acres of verdant land on the eastern side of the Emmitsburg Road about two miles south of Gettysburg. On July 2, 1863, this patch of ground—sandwiched between the Peach Orchard to the south and Cemetery Ridge to the north—became a vortex for tens of thousands of men as the armies renewed the second day of battle. Scott Fink’s A Little Piece of Hell at Gettysburg: The Attack and Defense of the Rose Farm, July 2-3, 1863 is the first full-length study to focus on its significance.
Confederates under James Longstreet swept across the Rose Farm from different directions in a bid to crush and roll up Maj. Gen. George Meade’s left flank. The Rose property, which included the Stony Hill and the Rose Woods, witnessed some of the heaviest fighting of the war as thousands of Georgians and South Carolinians flooded onto the property from the east and southeast, driving westward into sheets of lead and iron. One of the fields, a 20-acre plot across which some 20,000 men of both armies would march, charge, fight and die—often in hand-to-hand combat—is better known today as The Wheatfield. Union men from several corps from different parts of the field would be rushed into the swirling chaos to stem the break in the line and hold fast. Heavy musketry fire and death-dealing artillery littered the ground and surrounding woodlots with wounded and dead soldiers.
The stone walls of the house and barn were used by the Rebels for shelter and, after the fighting, the buildings served as a Confederate field hospital. Between 500 and 1,000 Confederates were buried on the Rose property. Alexander Gardner took some of the most famous photographs of the war there, mostly of dead Georgians from Tige Anderson’s Georgia brigade. There is a reason this place earned distinction as the bloodiest farm in American history. One of Rose’s daughters suffered from chronic nightmares and bouts of hysteria, which today is better known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. The doctor treating her surmised she was “driven mad” and prescribed the use of a straitjacket for her condition. John claimed her anxiety was the result of hundreds of Confederate graves littering the property.
A Little Piece of Hell at Gettysburg is grounded in deep research and moving prose that carries readers through every stage of the fighting. The author, a combat veteran, carefully examines the battle from the perspective of both the generals who planned it and the men in the ranks who fought it. His use of scores of archival and firsthand accounts, together with original maps, explanatory footnotes, and a keen understanding of the terrain, sheds significant new light on the experiences of these front-line troops. The fighting on the Rose Farm played a critical role in the fortunes of both armies at Gettysburg, and this fresh and original study helps put their sacrifices in context.
Scott T. Fink attended Towson University and graduated from the Washington School of Photography, both in his home state of Maryland. He served in the U.S. Army and Maryland Army National Guard for nearly 19 years and retired as a Staff Sergeant. He is the author of several published articles that appeared in Civil War Times and Gettysburg Magazine. He has been an avid student of the Civil War for many years and spent much of the last decade studying Gettysburg in general, and Gettysburg photographs in particular. An Iraq War veteran and Purple Heart recipient, Scott lives in Olney, Maryland, with his wife, three children, and two dogs.
