A discussion about the absurdity of some recent prices for "Gettysburg" etched souvenir shells and the upcoming 150th anniversary of the battle got me to thinking about these souvenirs and a story I have to tell.
At one auction I was an absentee bidder on this broken in half sideloader Read. Nobody could read the label and to make matters better for me, there was a huge snowstorm that day so nobody went to the auction. I got it for the reserve which was nominal.
When it arrived, I deciphered what I could of the label and this is where the interesting stuff begins.
3” CS Read Sideloader – War Souvenir of Conrad Arensberg, Private Hampton’s Pennsylvania Light Artillery, Company F.
The deteriorated label is signed by Conrad Arensberg and describes his wounding near the high water mark. He served at Gettysburg and went back one time 50 years later where presumably he obtained this shell which is in two pieces that fit together perfectly.
Here is a snippet of a documented family history I found online as told by Conrad Arensberg’s son:
After the fall of Fort Sumter the President called for volunteers to serve, as I remember reading it, for 90 days. My father came back from Iowa to Pittsburgh and enlisted. The thing then to do was to organize a company and go off as a Captain, which Father did, but someone stole his recruits overnight so he started off on foot alone, and joined the Army during the battle of Antietam. My Uncle Lou was already there as a Private in Pennsylvania’s Independent Battery B which was Hampton’s Battery and my father’s principal recollections of the battle was Uncle Lou constantly calling out to him “Connie, (or really Louie) keep you head down.”
My father stayed in the Army some three or four years. After he was wounded he served in Harrisburg as a clerk to the Provost General. Again from his diary:
"While I was employed in Harrisburg, Lincoln was assassinated. His remains lay here in the Capitol Representative Room, on his way to final burial at Springfield, Ill. While he was lying in State here, I was one of the honor guards and stood at the head of the coffin during the time the people were passing and viewing the remains."
Army life may have agreed with him. At least he was no longer "consumptive." He organized a band or an orchestra, and transported the instruments himself, including a bass fiddle in a coffin lashed to caisson. We children had his cap and canteen and played with them until they were worn out or disappeared.
I remember that there was a daguerreotype around the house, which he had picked up at Antietam or Chancellorsville on the battlefield. It was a picture of a young girl, some dead soldier’s sweetheart, and when Susie, Charlie’s daughter, found it, she gave it to the War Museum at Richmond, Virginia, as a more proper place for it than a Yankee’s cabinet.
My father would not visit any of the battlefield sites until he had been out of the service 50 years. He then went on a trip to see the battlefield at Gettysburg, and found that Hampton’s Battery had been at the stonewall, bordering the field across which Pickett led his disastrous charge. The charge was stopped, and only Olmstead (sic, means Armistead), if that was his name, got beyond the guns. A monument marks the spot.
At Gettysburg my father was badly wounded in the scrimmage, or in the aftermath, when a cannon burst. The explosion killed one man, Charles Bright, and wounded my father, who was taken to a hospital, improvised in a church in Boonesboro, Md., near Gettysburg. The surgeons wanted to cut off both of his legs, but they were dissuaded by his brother, Louie, who worried that Father would not be able to return to his work as a mason. Among his attendants at the hospital was the famous Dr. Mary Walker in trousers and tall hat. When Father recovered sufficiently he was invalided home. The day he returned my grandmother was in the kitchen making bread, arms covered with flour. Suddenly the little family dog went wild with excitement, the door opened, and there was Father home again. Years later, when my father bought the house at Oakmont, we found a little graveyard with a shaft monument to the memory of Charles Bright, the soldier killed by my father’s side.
