Winter Lecture Series

Sunday January 26 – What About Wofford? – The Most Destructive Artillery Impact Documented at the Battle of Gettysburg

Presented by Laura Elliot, Historian

In 1878, fifteen years after the Battle of Gettysburg, Major General Lafayette McLaws lamented, “One company…had, by the bursting of a shell in its front as it went into the charge, lost thirty men….” Even a decade and a half after that moment on July 2, 1863, the aging general never knew that savage shell was the single most destructive artillery impact of the entire battle. Failing to identify which regiment that devastated company belonged, or brigade for that matter, nearly 150 years after writing of this episode of war, the mystery has finally been solved.