Jun 26, 2011 - Tour of Antietam battlefield

We stayed the next two nights in Harpers Ferry as it is only 30 minutes from Sharpsburg and the Antietam battlefield. While traveling through West Virginia to Antietam we often found the GPS map didn’t know anything about the roads we were on. This caused the route it selected to be less than best. One time it sent us down this narrow very backwoods road that dead ended at the railroad tracks. The locals told us “Yap, them GPS’s keep a sending folks down here showing the road goes on but it hasn’t in years. We’ve been a trying to get the...

Nov 15, 2010 - The Old South And Fall's Beauty

We’ve spent the last couple weeks touring parts of the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia and visiting the old south. Fall has come to the mountains and we’ve enjoyed the spectacle of colors and the cooler (freezing) weather. Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia and the nearby Antietam Battlefield are wonderful historic places to visit and both are operated by the National Park Service. The town of Harper’s Ferry has many preserved historic buildings to tour. Harper’s Ferry gained notoriety in 1859 when abolitionist John Brown and his small...

Jul 4, 2010 - Antietam National Battlefield

Hope everyone has had an enjoyable Fourth in whatever way you celebrate America’s independence. I usually like to post a few photos depicting the various ways Americans show their patriotism. We saw many flags and banners, but my favorite was the flags decorating the utility poles along Main Street in Sharpsburg, Maryland. We spent our day touring Antietam National Battlefield. Like Gettysburg, Shiloh, and the other major battlefields of the Civil War, it was sobering to walk on the land where so many Americans had fallen. Antietam was the...

May 20, 2010 - Antietam National Battlefield, MD 1 of 2

We enjoyed a very interesting and informative ranger talk on the battle of Antietam. The battle of Antietam was the bloodiest one-day battle of the Civil War. Of the 100,000 soldiers engaged in the battle over 23,000 were killed, wounded or missing at the end of the day. There are six mortuary cannons along the tour marking where three Confederate and three Union Generals were killed in the battle.

Jun 27, 2008 - The Bloodiest One Day Battle of the Civil War

After making a short side trip back to West Virginia to get another ABC picture, we spent the day exploring Antietam National Battlefield in Maryland to learn about the horrible battle there on September 17, 1862. Fred chose a delightful route to get to the park, traveling on some small country roads from Pennsylvania that took us through a small covered bridge and for awhile into both Catoctin Mountain Park, run by the national park service, and Maryland’s Cunningham Falls State Park; both were so pretty with forested areas, more rocky...