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Civil War

CS Chesapeake MD Artillery "Brown’s Battery"

Straban Township, Adams County, Pennsylvania

Marker Inscription

Army of Northern Virginia Ewell’s Corps Johnson’s Division Latimer’s Battalion Brown’s Battery The Chesapeake Md. Artillery Four 10 Pounder Parrotts

The Story

This monument marks the Confederate Chesapeake Maryland Artillery — Brown's Battery — of Latimer's Battalion in Johnson's Division of Ewell's Corps, Army of Northern Virginia, armed with four 10-pounder Parrott rifles. Marylanders who cast their lot with the South served in units like this one, which fought on the Confederate left during the battle of early July 1863. Gettysburg drew soldiers from across a divided nation, including border-state men fighting far from a home that had stayed in the Union.

Why it matters

The battery testifies to the wrenching divisions of the Civil War, when men from a Union border state like Maryland fought under Confederate colors at the war's decisive battle.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

In the summer of 1863, the great Confederate army marched north out of Virginia and into Pennsylvania, and for three days in early July it clashed with the Union army across the fields and ridges around a small town. The fighting that unfolded here became the largest and costliest battle of the Civil War.

Artillery was the thunder of that war. Batteries of cannon were positioned on high ground and along the lines to hammer enemy formations, break up attacks, and soften positions before an assault. Where a battery stood often shaped the fighting around it, and this monument marks the place held by one such Confederate battery.

The men served in the Army of Northern Virginia, in the corps and division and battalion named on the tablet. But their unit's name tells a more complicated story than a simple line on an order of battle — because these were Marylanders, fighting under Southern colors in a war that had split their own border state down the middle.

People & events

This monument records the Chesapeake Maryland Artillery — known as Brown's Battery — part of a battalion in a division of the corps named on the tablet, armed with four 10-pounder Parrott rifles. The Parrott was a rifled iron cannon, recognizable by the reinforcing band around its breech, prized for the range and accuracy that rifling gave it over older smoothbore guns.

What makes this battery poignant is where its men came from. Maryland never left the Union, but it was a slaveholding border state with deeply divided loyalties, and thousands of its sons slipped south to fight for the Confederacy. The men serving these guns had, in effect, chosen a side against their own state's official allegiance.

So when this battery went into action here, its Marylanders were fighting far from home, on Northern soil, for a cause their home state had declined to join. That tension — of a border state at war with itself — was carried in the very name painted on their guns.

Its place in the American story

The battle fought across this ground is remembered as the turning point of the Civil War, the moment the Confederate tide reached its high mark in the North and then receded. Understanding it means understanding not just the armies but the divided country that sent them.

Border states like Maryland embodied that division most painfully. The war is sometimes imagined as a clean line between North and South, but in places like Maryland the line ran through counties, towns, and families. Brothers, neighbors, and cousins could and did end up on opposite sides.

This battery is a small, concrete testament to that reality. Standing on ground held by Union defenders of their home state, it marks where men from a Union border state fought under Confederate flags — a reminder that the war's fault lines were personal as often as they were geographic.

If you visit

This is one of hundreds of unit tablets and monuments planted across the battlefield, each marking where a specific command stood. Part of the pleasure of visiting is reading them closely — and this one rewards a careful eye, because its Maryland name hints at the divided loyalties behind the Confederate line.

Look out over the ground the guns would have covered and picture four cannon in a row, their crews working under fire. Artillery positions were chosen for their fields of view, so notice what the site lets you see; the sightlines that mattered to gunners in 1863 are often still readable in the land today.

On a driving or walking tour of the battlefield, pair this stop with the nearby unit markers to build a picture of how the lines were arranged. Let the border-state story stay with you as you go: not every soldier here fought for the side you might expect from the state on his unit's name.

Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.

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  • · Battle of Gettysburg

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