View of Antietam Creek, captured by photographer Alexander Gardner
Library of Congress
This tranquil view of Antietam Creek, captured by photographer Alexander Gardner from the vantage point of the Joseph Newcomer house near the Middle Bridge, gives no sense of the destruction and awful remnants of the fighting that occurred there just five days before, on September 17, 1862. Only the damaged fences hint at the wider devastation wrought by the Battle of Antietam. Just over the hill in the left distance is the Sunken Road, a Confederate defensive position that during the battle became known as Bloody Lane. The awful smell of decaying bodies permeated the area and the fields were littered with battle detritus and pockmarked with hastily dug mass graves when this photograph was taken.
This stands as arguably the rarest of the more than 120 images Gardner made at Antietam and in the area. He took the photo as a stereo view, and while both halves of the original glass plate negative still exist at the Library of Congress, the left half is marred by large dark areas in the heart of the negative, and the right half, shown here, is partially broken. No vintage prints of this photo are known to exist, perhaps because of the negative damage. The image was published in The Memorial War Book in 1890, the first large compendium of Civil War photos, although the publishers used the marred half of the stereo negative.
Bob Zeller is president of the nonprofit Center for Civil War Photography, which is devoted to collecting, preserving, and digitizing Civil War images.
