Sculpted by Gary Casteel
1863 Signed and Numbered Limited Edition Monument Replicas
The men of the 9th Massachusetts Battery had never heard a shot fired in battle until the afternoon of July 2, 1863. Captain John Bigelow, twenty-two years old and already carrying the weight of command, led them forward from the reserve to shore up Gen. Dan Sickles’s exposed Third Corps along the Wheatfield Road. Six bronze Napoleons. A hundred and ten men. Eighty-eight horses. That was all they had.
When the Confederate tide broke through the Peach Orchard and the Union line began to unravel, the order came to fall back. Bigelow’s battery was among the last to leave. They did not simply limber up and gallop away. They retired “by prolonge”—firing as they went, the guns bucking and rolling backward under their own recoil, the crews loading and sponging and firing again while the horses strained against the ropes. Four hundred yards of open ground, under a storm of shot and shell, back toward the Trostle farm.
At the farmyard, at the angle of the stone walls and the narrow lane by the barn, Lt. Col. Freeman McGilvery rode up and told them to stop. Hold here, he said. Hold at all hazards. Buy time. Give the rest of the army a chance to form a new line to the rear. So, they unlimbered in the yard of Abraham Trostle’s farm and stacked their double cannister ammunition beside the guns and waited for the gray wave. It came in the shape of Barksdale’s Mississippians, the 21st Mississippi leading the charge. The Massachusetts gunners opened at point-blank range and canister tore gaps in the ranks. The Confederates staggered, reformed, and came on again. The battery was alone—no infantry support, hemmed in by fences and walls, the flanks closing in. Horses went down in harness, men fell at the trails, and still the guns spoke.
When the Mississippians finally swarmed over the position, the fight became hand-to-hand. Rammers and sponge staffs against bayonets and rifle butts. Four of the six guns were overrun and temporarily lost. Bigelow himself went down wounded. Of the eighty-eight horses that had pulled the battery into action, the majority lay dead or dying in the farmyard and the fields around it. The ground was carpeted with them. Yet those twenty or thirty minutes bought by the 9th Massachusetts were priceless. Behind them, Lt. Col. Freeman McGilvery scraped together a new line of guns along Plum Run. The Confederate momentum faltered and the Union center held.
The guns were later recovered. The battery was shattered—nearly thirty men killed, wounded, or missing—but it had done what was asked of it. In its first fight, a green battery of Massachusetts volunteers stood in the path of a Confederate brigade and paid the price so that the army might live to fight another day.
The marker was dedicated on October 19, 1885, and is located on the north side of United States Ave. in front of the Trostle house.
