Protecting the Shepherdstown Battlefield in West Virginia

In 2023 the National Park Service's American Battlefield Protection Program awarded a Battlefield Land Acquisition Grant to the Jefferson County Farmland Protection Board in West Virginia.

The battle

In early fall 1862, people in Shepherdstown, then in Virginia, could hear the pop and rumble of artillery from Sharpsburg, Maryland, where Union and Confederate armies were fighting along Antietam Creek. That battle, the bloodiest day of the Civil War, ended in a tense tactical stalemate that left both armies battered and waiting to see what the other would do.

On September 19 the Confederates pulled back and took up positions on the west bank of the Potomac River, east of Shepherdstown, to keep Union forces from cutting off their retreat. Union troops brought up nearly 70 artillery pieces to cover a river crossing by Brigadier General George Sykes's division. When Sykes attacked the next day, he put a brigade of U.S. Regulars at the front. Six Confederate brigades counterattacked and drove the Regulars and the units supporting them back across the Potomac.

Small beside Antietam, the fight at Shepherdstown ended the Maryland Campaign and kept the Union army from stopping the Confederate withdrawal. A year later Confederate forces came back to use the same ford to start their invasion of Pennsylvania — this time crossing from West Virginia, by then a new Union state.

What the grant protects

The grant supports the board's work to keep the battlefield's rural character by placing a perpetual conservation easement on fields of alfalfa, hay and pasture. An easement lets farmers keep working their land while protecting it from future development and subdivision.

The program

The American Battlefield Protection Program's Battlefield Land Acquisition Grants help preservation partners across the country buy and protect threatened battlefields of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 and the Civil War. The program also runs three other grants: Preservation Planning Grants, open to any site of armed conflict on American soil, and the newly authorized Battlefield Restoration and Battlefield Interpretation grants. The aim is community-led stewardship of historic places by states, tribes and localities.

Sources

• National Park Service, American Battlefield Protection Program: "Protecting Farmland and a Strategic River Crossing: Battle of Shepherdstown." Its photograph of the fields, credited to the Jefferson County Historic Landmarks Commission, is not reproduced.