The stone observatory on the Bloody lane is now finished and ready for visitors. The view from this point alone is worth a visit to the famous Bloody lane as you can take in the entire right to the left nearly four miles. There will be, when all planted, nearly four hundred markers, giving one a good idea of the entire battle field with the advantage of the good roads. Every body ought to visit it and make a study of this great battle.
A truly remarkable Antietam find!
Submitted by StephenRecker on Thu, 02/13/2014 - 8:21pm
This really blew me away. Probably the most important acquisition I made during the writing of my book, Rare Images of Antietam, was an album of photographs taken by a veteran of the battle named Solomon McFarland. He took many very rare images of Antietam Battlefield and I was lucky to find them right before I finished my book.
Well, I recently bought a group of Antietam stereoviews taken by B.W.T. Phreaner. They were on an online auction so I never really got a great look at them. I only knew that they were Antietam Phreaner stereoviews, and they are quite rare. So, imagine my surprise when they came in the mail and I looked on the back and I saw that they had belonged to Solomon McFarland himself! They even had a date, 1887, which will be a real help interpreting them.
Another cool thing is that the lot includes two stereoviews taken by Alexander Gardner of the Antieatm dead. When William Tipton wanted to re-publish those images he apparently was not able to find copies, so McFarland loaned him his. These may well be two that Tipton borrowed from McFarland.
About
Hello. I'm Stephen Recker and welcome to my blog. In it I will be discussing the different projects I am working on related to the American Civil War with a focus on photography related to the battle of Antietam. I am particularly interested in how the battlefield has been interpreted throughout the years. I will be discussing how it was done then and how new technologies can be brought to bear to bring life to those old materials as well as new ones. See the 99 Places Every Antietam Battlefield Guide Should Know.
Sharpsburg Items
Antietam Valley Record
Thursday, September 5, 1895