Antietam Time Travel: A Veteran of America’s Bloodiest Day Returns to Capture Photos of Scenes of Carnage
By John Banks
JANUARY 2019 • AMERICA'S CIVIL WAR MAGAZINE
At 4 p.m. on September 18, 1891, Oliver Cromwell Gould, son of 10th Maine Infantry veteran John Mead Gould, took a photograph of Antietam’s East Woods, where his father had witnessed momentous events 29 years earlier. Three days later, at 8 a.m., Oliver focused his camera on a nearby 10-acre field that included a prominent mulberry tree. In the far distance, a wooden fence stretched along the old Smoketown Road—the route his father took to battle on September 17, 1862. We know precisely when and where these historic images were taken because of the meticulousness of John Gould, who accompanied his 21-year-old son to Antietam and wrote details about each photograph in pen on the back mounting for each. According to a detailed logbook kept by his father, Oliver Gould took at least two dozen images at Antietam in 1891, including an unknown number of shots of the iconic Dunker Church. Unfortunately, just about all of those images are believed lost to history. One, displayed above, is in the possession of Virginia-based collector Nicholas Picerno, and six more (shown here in the chronological order in which they were taken) surfaced in New Jersey in January 2018. They provide a reverent window into the early, postwar appearance of one of the nation’s most hallowed battlefields.
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