Meetinghouse

At the end of the day the Army of Northern Virginia was bottled up against a bend of the Potomac. All the next day McClellan watched from the long slope rising north of the river and refused to advance, even with a two-to-one numerical advantage. Were the numbers ten-to-one he would yet wire Washington to say he didn't have enough men.

The meetinghouse of the local German Baptist Brethren had been pressed into service as a field hospital for the Union army. Dried blood stained the interior walls, only to be overlaid with sprays of new blood. One doctor sedated men with chloroform while another doctor sawed off their limbs and threw them into a pile. A messenger arrived by horse and ordered the doctors to get the wounded out by wagon. The pile of amputated limbs was set ablaze. Horse-drawn ambulances carted the wounded away with every bump in the road eliciting screams from the men inside. No one who witnessed the convoy of pain and the carnage that was left behind would again say they craved the glories of war. Certainly none of the Christian Brethren did.

Three days prior, when they first heard the sound of artillery on South Mountain the Brethren had thought it prudent to move their work horses by circuitous routes to a place far away from the men of either army who might like to "borrow" them. Upon their poor leftover mules they rode out, when it seemed safe, to bury the dead. For this task the United States paid a dollar for every man they laid to rest. There was heard a rumor that one fellow, who was not of the Brethren, took the money and dropped sixty dead men into a dry well.

Many hundreds of bodies lay near the house of prayer of the Brethren. They found their labors to be a hateful thing that, but more bitter was seeing their beloved meetinghouse riddled with holes made by bullets and even solid cannon shot, and how the interior had come to resemble a slaughterhouse. The Long Table was covered with blood, and both the east door, where the menfolk entered, and the south door, where the womenfolk entered, had been removed from the hinges and converted into operating tables. The expensive Bible gifted to the congregation by Daniel Miller was missing.

Chief elder David Long, forty-two years of age, inspected the meetinghouse thoroughly and said, "Do not grieve overmuch, my friends. We shall bury the dead and make our meetinghouse like new. If God is willing, soon all this will be but an unhappy memory."

To this Deacon Mark Lange objected, saying, "Nothing will stop the same thing from happening once more, Brother David. Virginia lies over yonder river and last month there was a second battle of Manassas. This is an easy spot to get across the water. We should build anew at my uncle's farm north in Pennsylvania. By his leave our horses have already been moved there to guard against thieves.”