Not everyone who died at Gettysburg was wearing a uniform.
Jennie Wade was 20 years old, staying at her sister Georgia Anna’s house on the edge of town, helping out because Georgia Anna had just given birth. The war had shown up on their doorstep by then…quite literally. Union soldiers were passing through, hungry, and Jennie was doing what she could. Baking bread for them, batch after batch, while the battle raged just outside.
On July 3rd, 1863, that closeness to the fighting caught up with her. Stray bullets and artillery fire had already been hitting the brick house for two days. Jennie was in the kitchen, kneading dough, when a bullet came through the outer door and struck her in the back. She died almost instantly.
She’s remembered today as the only civilian killed during the entire battle. Out of everyone caught in the largest fight ever waged on American soil…one woman, in her own kitchen, doing something as ordinary as baking bread.
That’s what gets me about her story every time I tell it. Jennie Wade isn’t a general or a colonel making a battlefield decision. She’s just a young woman trying to feed soldiers passing through, and the war didn’t care that she wasn’t a combatant.
They buried her in the garden at first (there wasn’t really another option, with the fighting still going on around them), and she was later moved to Evergreen Cemetery, where people still visit her grave today. Her house is still standing too, still marked, still telling her story to whoever stops to read it. That’s why we name it a must see in our full guide to Gettysburg.
Gettysburg gets talked about in terms of regiments and flanks and casualty counts…tens of thousands of them. Jennie Wade is the reminder that the number was never just soldiers.
It was whoever happened to be standing in the wrong kitchen on the wrong afternoon.
Intro: 0:00
Jennie Wade: 0:24
What happened?: 1:16
The Jennie Wade house: 1:54
Jennie is shot: 3:07
Jennie Wade monument: 4:17
Jennie Wade legacy: 5:19
