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Civil War

US 150th PA “2nd Reg Bucktail Brigade” Wister / Huidekoper(w) / Jones

Cumberland Township, Adams County, Pennsylvania

Marker Inscription

2d. Brigade, 3d. Div. 1st Corps. July 2d. & 3d. 1863. Erected by survivors 1888 July 3d held this position under heavy fire until close of battle.

The Story

Erected by survivors in 1888, this monument honors the 150th Pennsylvania Infantry — a regiment of the Bucktail Brigade — for its stand in the First Corps on July 2 and 3, 1863, holding its position under heavy fire until the close of the battle. Among its officers, Henry Huidekoper was wounded and Colonel Langhorne Wister took command amid the desperate first-day fighting. That the veterans themselves raised the stone a quarter-century later speaks to what the ground meant to the men who survived it.

Why it matters

It reflects how Gettysburg's survivors turned the battlefield into a landscape of memory, marking their own endurance for the generations that followed.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

The summer of 1863 brought the Civil War north into Pennsylvania. After two years of fighting, the Confederate army crossed the Potomac and pushed into the farm country of the North, with the Union Army of the Potomac marching hard to catch it. The quiet fields of Adams County were about to become the site of the war's most famous battle.

Gettysburg drew the armies because so many roads converged there. When the two forces collided on July 1, 1863, and the fighting spread over the following days, the town and its surrounding ridges became the pivot on which the whole Eastern war seemed to turn.

The 150th Pennsylvania was a volunteer regiment caught up in that storm. It served in the First Corps and belonged to a brigade rooted in Pennsylvania's proud rifle tradition, the Bucktails. These were men from the state's own towns and counties, fighting a great battle on the soil of their home state.

People & events

This monument honors the 150th Pennsylvania Infantry, part of the Second Brigade, Third Division, First Corps — a regiment of the Bucktail Brigade. Its inscription records that the men held their position under heavy fire until the close of the battle, and that the survivors themselves raised the stone in 1888.

The regiment's ordeal is bound up with two of its officers. In the fierce fighting, Colonel Langhorne Wister was called to take command as the pressure mounted, and Henry Huidekoper was among those wounded. Their names on and around this marker stand for the leadership the regiment needed on a day when officers fell and command passed from hand to hand under fire.

That the veterans waited until 1888 — a full quarter-century after the battle — and then paid to set this stone tells its own story. These were middle-aged men by then, with families and ordinary lives, who nonetheless felt they owed something to the ground and to the comrades they had left on it. The inscription's emphasis on holding 'under heavy fire until close of battle' is the survivors' own summary of what they endured.

Its place in the American story

Gettysburg turned back the Confederate invasion of the North and is remembered as the great hinge of the Civil War. The endurance of regiments like this one — holding their assigned ground against repeated pressure — was the raw material out of which that victory was made.

Just as significant is what the survivors did afterward. When they returned in 1888 to raise this monument, they were part of a vast movement of Civil War veterans who transformed Gettysburg into a landscape of memory, marking their positions in stone so the battle would not be forgotten.

Those monuments changed how the nation remembers its most costly war. They insisted that memory be anchored to specific, real places and specific, real men — Wister taking command, Huidekoper wounded, a regiment refusing to yield — rather than to vague glory. This stone is a small piece of that national act of remembrance.

If you visit

When you reach this monument, read its inscription slowly and remember that the men who wrote it had stood on this exact spot under fire. The words are spare, but they were chosen by survivors to say precisely what mattered to them: that they held on to the end.

Look for the names tied to the regiment's story and let them turn an abstract 'unit' into flesh and blood — a colonel stepping up to command, an officer carried off wounded, and the many who are not named at all. The stone is both a marker of position and a memorial to endurance.

Set it into a broader tour of the battlefield and give the surrounding ground your attention. Part of Gettysburg's power is how ordinary the countryside looks today, and how much history sits quietly on top of it. A monument raised by aging veterans in 1888 is a reminder that this peaceful field was, for them, the most important ground of their lives.

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

  • · Langhorne Wister
  • · Henry Huidekoper

Related events

  • · Battle of Gettysburg

Themes & tags

Civil WarMonument

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