Gettysburg Campaign
Guilford Township, Franklin County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
General Albert G. Jenkins' brigade of Southern cavalry entered Chambersburg on June 15, 1863, in advance of the main invasion force, and later led the invading army, June 22-24. General Robert E. Lee entered Chambersburg on June 26.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Chambersburg felt the Confederate invasion early: General Albert G. Jenkins' Southern cavalry rode in on June 15, 1863, well ahead of the main army, and returned to lead the advance a week later. On June 26, Robert E. Lee himself entered the town at the head of the Army of Northern Virginia. From this staging ground the Confederates fanned out across south-central Pennsylvania in the days before Gettysburg.
Why it matters
Chambersburg became a nerve center of Lee's 1863 invasion, showing how deep Confederate forces penetrated Northern soil in the campaign that climaxed at Gettysburg.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In June 1863, the war came to Chambersburg, a busy market town in the fertile Cumberland Valley of south-central Pennsylvania. This was Northern soil, well behind what most people thought of as the front, and its citizens had grown used to reading about the war rather than living it. That summer the war arrived in person.
Robert E. Lee had decided to carry the fighting north, drawing his Army of Northern Virginia out of war-weary Virginia and into Pennsylvania's rich farmland and thriving towns. Chambersburg, sitting on the main roads of the valley, was an obvious waypoint for an army that needed room to gather, supplies to seize, and routes to fan out along.
For a town that had known the conflict mostly as distant news, the sight of Confederate columns in its streets was a shock—and a vivid lesson in how far the war could reach.
People & events
The first sign came on June 15, 1863, when General Albert G. Jenkins rode into Chambersburg at the head of a brigade of Southern cavalry, well ahead of the main army. Horsemen like these were the eyes of an advancing force, scouting the roads and testing the ground before the infantry followed.
A week later, on June 22, Jenkins's cavalry returned—this time leading the invasion in earnest, with the great mass of the army coming up behind. For several days the town sat at the leading edge of one of the largest movements of troops the North would ever see.
Then, on June 26, Robert E. Lee himself entered Chambersburg. The commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, one of the most watched men of the age, was now standing on Pennsylvania ground. From this gathering point his forces spread out across the surrounding countryside in the days just before the armies met at Gettysburg.
Its place in the American story
Chambersburg's few days in the path of the invasion tell a larger story: just how deep Confederate power reached in the summer of 1863. This was not a raid on the border but a full army operating far inside a Northern state, feeding itself on Northern farms and marching through Northern streets.
That penetration is exactly what made the coming battle so momentous. A Confederate army loose in Pennsylvania threatened cities, rail lines, and the confidence of the whole Union war effort. The stakes at Gettysburg were high precisely because the enemy had come so far.
When you understand that Lee's headquarters was, for a moment, in a Pennsylvania town like this one, the campaign stops being an abstraction. It becomes a matter of real roads and real communities, and the eventual Union victory at Gettysburg takes on the weight of having turned that tide back.
If you visit
Chambersburg is a working town with a walkable center, so this is history layered into everyday life rather than set apart in a park. Look for the marker as part of the town's streetscape and let it reframe the ordinary buildings and roads around you as the stage for an army's passage.
Stand where the main routes meet and picture the sequence the inscription records—cavalry first, then the leading edge of the invasion, then the commanding general himself. The same roads that carry local traffic today once carried a Confederate army toward its fate.
Chambersburg makes an excellent first stop on a Gettysburg-bound road trip, since it lets you follow the campaign in the order it actually unfolded: the staging ground first, the battlefield later. Give yourself time to walk a block or two on foot, where the human scale of the town brings the story closest.
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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Related people
- · Albert G. Jenkins
- · Robert E. Lee
Related events
- · Gettysburg Campaign
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Chambersburg
Chambersburg, PA · est. 1948
Benjamin Chambers settled at the forks of the Conococheague in 1734 and laid out "Chambers Town" in 1764; two decades later it became the seat of the newly formed Franklin County. During the Civil War the town sat squarely in the path of Confederate operations—raided by J.E.B. Stuart's cavalry in 1862, occupied by Confederate troops in 1863, and finally put to the torch in 1864 when residents refused a ransom demand.
Martin Delany (1812-1885)
Chambersburg, PA · est. 2003
Educated in Chambersburg as the son of a free mother and an enslaved father, Martin Delany became one of the most formidable Black voices of his century. He published the antislavery newspaper The Mystery, joined Frederick Douglass in the abolitionist cause, and in 1865 became the first African American commissioned as a field officer in the United States Army. Physician, editor, and activist, he pressed for freedom on many fronts.
Suesserott House
Chambersburg, PA · est. 1969
This Federal-era house, built around 1807, later served as the home of Dr. Jacob Suesserott, a well-regarded physician and surgeon. Its place in history was sealed on July 30, 1864, when Confederate cavalry under orders to extract a ransom set fire to Chambersburg; the flames that consumed much of the town were halted at this point. The burning of Chambersburg remains the only major Northern town destroyed by Confederate forces during the Civil War.
Israel Benevolent Society Cemetery
Chambersburg, PA · est. 2002
Consecrated in 1844, this Chambersburg burial ground was established by a Jewish Holy Burial Society so that the area's small but growing Jewish community could bury its dead according to Jewish law. It stands as the first Jewish cemetery west of Philadelphia, opened during the wave of mid-19th-century migration that carried Jewish families inland from the coast. Among those interred is Isaac Burgauer, remembered as the only Southern Jewish soldier who fell at Gettysburg to rest in a Northern Jewish cemetery.