Booknotes: A Little Piece of Hell at Gettysburg

New Arrival:

• A Little Piece of Hell at Gettysburg: The Attack and Defense of the Rose Farm, July 2-3, 1863 by Scott T. Fink (Savas Beatie, 2026).

It shouldn't surprise anyone that the Gettysburg literature hosts a number of microhistories of micro-sectors of the battlefield. One of the better known examples of these is Elwood Christ's "Over a Wide, Hot...Crimson Plain": The Struggle for the Bliss Farm at Gettysburg, July 2nd and 3rd, 1863, which was first published in the 1990s by Butternut & Blue and reissued in paperback by Savas Beatie in 2023. Now, SB shifts attention toward another Gettysburg farm immortalized by the battle with Scott Fink's A Little Piece of Hell at Gettysburg: The Attack and Defense of the Rose Farm, July 2-3, 1863.

From the description: "The unassuming stone farmhouse, where John and Ann Rose and their seven children lived, stood 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 Little Round Top to the south and the Peach Orchard to the north—became a vortex for tens of thousands of men as the armies renewed the second day of battle."

An introductory history of the farm, the origins of which can be traced back to 1741, is provided, and the events that occurred on the farmland during the battle are the main focus of the book. On July 2, the sheer number of unwanted visitors and ferocious intensity of the fighting on the Rose family's property earned it the unenviable "distinction as the bloodiest farm in American history."

More from the description: "Confederates under James Longstreet swept across the Rose farm from different directions in a bid to crush Maj. Gen. George Meade’s left flank. The Rose land, which included the Stony Hill and the Rose Woods, saw some of the heaviest fighting of the war as thousands of Georgians and South Carolinians flooded onto the property from the west and southwest 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 soldiers from several corps, arriving from different parts of the field, rushed into the swirling chaos to stem the break in the line and hold fast."

Of course, that back and forth fighting produced mass casualties, and the Rose farm land and buildings were quickly converted into one of the battle's major field hospitals. Also, "(b)etween 500 and 1,000 Southerners were buried on the Rose property," making the grounds a very significant temporary burial site. In addition to covering those topics, Fink's study traces the farm's postwar history, including the exhumations of buried remains, up to today. Given that "Alexander Gardner took some of the most famous photographs of the war there, mostly of dead Georgians from George T. Anderson’s Brigade," a chapter is also devoted to closely analyzing the many classic images associated with the Rose Farm.

Fink's detailed narrative, well supported by maps and other illustrations, full explores the ways in which "(t)he fighting on the Rose farm played a critical role in the fortunes of both armies at Gettysburg, and, along the way, "(t)his original new study helps put the sacrifices of those who fought there in context."