Antietam on the Web achieved a milestone today – we now can show you faces of 2,000 of the participants in the Battle of Antietam as they probably looked when they were there.

This is not far from 10% of the nearly 22,000 people in the AotW database and is amazing to me – I’ve been putting up pictures of them one at a time as I find them, for many years, not really keeping score.

A big thank you to all the descendants and collectors who have shared their treasured pictures with me, and to all the organizations large and small who have posted theirs online for me to find.

To mark the day, here’s one of my most recent finds and poignant faces – that of 17 year old William E Hacker of Worcester, Massachusetts. A recent graduate of a military prep school in Worcester, he was appointed 2nd Lieutenant of Company A, 3rd Maryland Infantry in March 1862, and fought with them at Antietam, where he was shot in the chest. He survived that and returned to duty in January 1863, soon after promoted to Captain, but died of typhoid fever in March 1863 at age 18.

His carte de visite (CDV) here is one of two of him in the Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs at the Library of Congress – a massive and growing resource for people like us.

If you have a wartime picture of someone who was at the battle, or know of one online I haven’t seen yet, please let me know. I have so much more to do.

Here’s another excuse to show you Surgeon B. A. Vanderkieft‘s fabulous signature. In this case, on a certificate for Corporal Edmund Davis of the 35th Massachusetts Infantry, who suffered a terrible wound to his right thigh at Antietam on 17 September 1862. He recovered, in the sense that he didn’t die, but was afterward permanently disabled.

Davis returned to Massachusetts, studied the law, and began a lifelong career as a lawyer.

Sadly, nearly 35 years later, he killed himself – under threat of arrest for losing $30,000 of a client’s money in bad investments:

complete article: page 1 | page 2

Notes

His Certificate is among Corporal Davis’ Compiled Service Records at the National Archives; I got this copy from the fold3 collection.

The clipping and picture above are from a lengthy piece about Davis and his death published on the first two pages of the Boston Globe on 10 July 1897. These are online [page 1 | page 2] from newspapers.com

First Sergeant Oliver Peter Forbes was seriously wounded in the thigh at Antietam on 17 September 1862, and his surgeon thought he’d recovered by the end of the year, but he later faded and died of his wound in a field hospital at Keedysville. This notice is from the New York Times of 4 June 1863:

This item from the Frederick Examiner of 29 April 1863 is online thanks to Crossroads of War from the Catoctin Center for Regional Studies. My transcription:

About 3 o’clock on last Saturday afternoon, Mr. D Keplinger, living near the Battle field of Antietam, came to his death through the bursting of a conical shell. He was trying to remove the screw or cap of the shell found on the field, when it exploded, blowing off two of his fingers and driving the cap through his leg, severing the femoral artery. He lingered about eight hours, when death terminated his sufferings. He leaves a wife and children.

There were quite a number of Keplingers living in Sharpsburg and elsewhere in Washington County at the 1860 US Census, but I haven’t found a good match for this one.