Jennie Wade House

Mary Virginia Wade — 'Jennie' is itself a printing error that survived — was a Gettysburg seamstress, born May 21, 1843, who had gone to her sister Georgia's house on July 1 to help with a newborn baby when the armies arrived. She was buried temporarily in the back garden on July 4, in a coffin made for a Confederate general, while her mother finished the morning's work: fifteen loaves, baked from the dough Jennie had kneaded. Her body was moved to the German Reformed cemetery on Stratton Street in January 1864 and to Evergreen Cemetery in November 1865, where her grave now flies a permanent flag — one of very few civilian graves in the country so honored. In 1882 the U.S. Senate granted her mother a pension on the grounds that Jennie had died serving the Union cause — baking bread for the soldiers.

The personal file holds its own cruel bookkeeping. Jennie may have been engaged to Johnston 'Jack' Skelly, a corporal in the 87th Pennsylvania and a childhood friend; he had been mortally wounded at Winchester two weeks before Gettysburg and died on July 12, never knowing she was gone. She carried his photograph in her pocket when she died. Whether they were formally betrothed is a question the record cannot settle; the photograph in her pocket is a documented fact, and so is the timing.

The reports attached to the house are of the gentle sort: a female presence in the kitchen and on the stairs, the smell of baking bread in a building that has not baked in a century and a half, the sense that someone is still working in the rooms. The bullet holes remain in the doors through which the shot traveled, which gives the house the unusual quality of a haunting claim with its trajectory still marked in the woodwork. All of it is anecdotal; the dough, the coffin, and the fifteen loaves are documented.

The Jennie Wade House operates today as a museum of a civilian's war — bullet-pocked, furnished, and visited in a town whose ghost industry is otherwise built on fifty thousand soldiers. The file closes on proportion: the largest battle in the hemisphere produced exactly one civilian death, and it was a twenty-year-old woman making bread for the soldiers. Whatever presence the staff report is, on the evidence, the least surprising thing in the file.