behind AotW

a companion to Antietam on the Web

Day: August 10, 2020

  • Quebec Schoolhouse: a desperate little cavalry battle

    I should be doing something else, but got pulled off track by a trooper of the 3rd Indiana Cavalry, James Williamson, who was killed in a little-known cavalry skirmish at the Quebec Schoolhouse near Middletown, MD on 13 September 1862.

    His regiment’s historian, former Corporal William N. Pickerill wrote a fascinating account of that ‘desperate little cavalry battle’ for a newspaper in 1897, and put it in his regimental History in 1906. Because of him, I’ve spent the last couple of days putting names and faces with some of the men who were there.

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  • Surg Abner Hard

    Surgeon Abner Hard of the 8th Illinois Cavalry treated sick and wounded soldiers along the Army’s march from Washington to Sharpsburg. After Antietam he and his Assistant Surgeon Stull manned a hospital at Keedysville, MD. In 1868 he wrote and published the History of the Eighth Cavalry Regiment, Illinois Volunteers, which is where this etching of him (from a photograph) may be found.