Galesville
26 June 2012 | Miles = 1464
Stephen
We watched the warships leave Baltimore harbor, then checked out of the marina bound for Galesville. Skip had highly recommended the Hartge Marina, so we signed a 5 week contract to leave the boat here while we return home.
Galesville is a cute but very small community which is only about 15-20 minutes from Annapolis. We rented a car and have been able to shop, go to movies, and on Sunday we spent an entire day touring the Antietam battlefield.
Visiting Antietam is an emotional experience. On September 17, 1862, the bloodiest single day of the Civil War happened in the cornfields and woods near a small Maryland town named Sharpsburg. The numbers are almost incomprehensible: nearly 23,000 casualties in a single day. Two thousand two hundred Union men were killed in a 20 minute period in an area called the west woods, and some Confederate units had 60% casualties in an area called the bloody cornfield. It was chilling to stand in the very same places where Matthew Brady's photographs show row upon row of bloated bodies. Half of the Confederate dead remained unidentified and were buried in mass graves. Over the following few years, as remains were encountered by farmers working the land, many of the bodies were reinterred in local graveyards. The battlefield is maintained as a national shrine and appears much the same as it was in 1862.
We attended an antique banjo concert in the Dunker Church on the on the battleground and listened to the very same songs that the soldiers heard the day before the battle.
We will continue boat preparations over the next two days, then leave for Santa Barbara early on the 28th. After 2 weeks at home, we will then spend a week in Colorado with Kathy, Tyler, and Juliette, before returning to Galesville.