HistoricSiteMarkers
Civil War

US Colonel Charles F. Taylor

Cumberland Township, Adams County, Pennsylvania

Marker Inscription

Here fell Charles Frederick Taylor July 2, 1863 Age 23 years 4 months 26 days. Colonel of the “Bucktails” First Rifle Regiment P.R.V.C. Erected by his comrades and friends 1905

The Story

This monument marks where Colonel Charles Frederick Taylor, commander of the 'Bucktails' — the First Rifle Regiment of the Pennsylvania Reserve Volunteer Corps — fell on July 2, 1863, at the age of twenty-three. Erected by his comrades in 1905, it honors an officer killed leading his celebrated regiment during the Union counterattack near the Wheatfield. The Bucktails were known for the deer tails worn on their caps and their reputation as skilled riflemen.

Why it matters

It commemorates a young Pennsylvania officer and one of the war's most distinctive volunteer regiments, fighting to defend their own home state's soil.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

By July 1863 the Civil War had reached into Pennsylvania itself, as Robert E. Lee's Confederate army marched north and the Union's Army of the Potomac hurried to meet it. The armies met at Gettysburg, and over three days the farmland of Adams County became the site of the war's most famous battle.

For the soldiers of Pennsylvania, this fight carried a weight the men from distant states could not fully share: the enemy was on their own soil, threatening their own homes, farms, and families. Among the units defending that ground were the regiments of the Pennsylvania Reserve Volunteer Corps, home-state volunteers with a hard-won reputation.

One of these units had earned a distinctive name — the "Bucktails," the First Rifle Regiment of the Reserves, known for the deer tails their men wore on their caps and for their skill with the rifle. By the third year of the war they were veterans, and at Gettysburg they would be called on to defend the very state they came from.

People & events

This monument marks where Colonel Charles Frederick Taylor fell on July 2, 1863. The inscription records his age with heartbreaking precision — twenty-three years, four months, and twenty-six days — the kind of exactness that only a grieving family and devoted comrades would trouble to carve in stone.

Taylor commanded the Bucktails, and he died leading them during the fierce Union counterattack near the Wheatfield on the battle's second day. That afternoon and evening the Wheatfield changed hands again and again, a patch of farmland so soaked in fighting that it became one of the enduring names of the battle. Into that contest the Pennsylvania Reserves charged, and their young colonel was killed at their head.

The stone that stands here was erected in 1905 by his comrades and friends — men who had survived, grown older, and came back decades later to mark the exact place where they lost him. That gap of more than forty years tells its own story: how long the memory lasted, and how deeply it was felt.

Its place in the American story

Gettysburg was the turning point of the Civil War, the battle that broke the Confederacy's last great invasion of the North. The fighting for the Union left on July 2 — the Wheatfield among its bloodiest acres — was central to that outcome, and the Pennsylvania Reserves were part of the counterstroke that helped hold the line.

There is a particular poignancy in home-state soldiers defending their own ground, and the country understood it even then. The Bucktails had become one of the war's storied volunteer regiments, and their colonel's death here embodied the sacrifice a state made in its own defense.

The monument's later date matters too. It belongs to the great age of Gettysburg commemoration, when aging veterans returned to cover these fields with stone and bronze, determined that the places where their friends died would be marked forever. This is one small piece of that vast, deliberate act of national memory.

If you visit

This monument sits near the Wheatfield, one of the most contested corners of the entire battlefield. Stand here and read the inscription slowly — the precise tally of a young man's years is the sort of detail that stops visitors in their tracks and makes a century-and-a-half-old loss feel suddenly close.

Look around at the ground itself, and imagine it not as the peaceful field it is today but as the churning, smoke-filled contest it became on that July afternoon. The Wheatfield's reputation was earned in hours of back-and-forth fighting, and this stone marks one life given in the middle of it.

Remember, too, that this monument was placed by the colonel's own comrades in 1905. When you visit, you are standing where survivors chose to return and remember. It is a good place to slow down, and it fits naturally into a walk through the second day's fighting on the Union left.

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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  • · Charles Frederick Taylor

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  • · Battle of Gettysburg

Themes & tags

Civil WarMonument

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