In 1857, a free Black man named Abraham Brian—alternatively spelled as “Brien” in the 1850 census and “Bryan” in the 1860 census but “Brian” on his gravestone—bought twelve acres of property along Cemetery Ridge in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Brian couldn’t have possibly conceived the events that would transpire on his land just six years later and how they captured so much of the upheaval of the times. In fact, some of the biggest ironies of the war took place on his land (more about those in a bit!). Abraham Brian’s Family Born in Maryland in either 1804 or 1807—perhaps to enslaved

By the time the smoke cleared and combatants left the field after Longstreet’s Assault on July 3, 1863—popularly known as Pickett’s Charge—the carnage was horrific. All told during three bloody days in July, the Union Army saw an estimated 23,049 casualties: 3,155 killed, 14,529 wounded, and 5,365 missing/captured. According to the American Battlefield Trust, 1,500 Union soldiers were wounded or killed during the assault alone—and among them was twenty-one-year-old Captain Wells Waite Miller. Despite the severity of his wounds, unlike many of his comrades in battle, Wells survived. While there’s no way to definitively know why he did when so

Today, my husband and I went to Castalia Cemetery where we put a rose on Wells Waite Miller’s grave and decided to investigate the Soldiers Monument. The Soldiers Monument was created by Hughes Granite and Marble Company of Clyde, Ohio. This was, at the time, apparently a well known granite company with its records now stored at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library and Museum. The cost of Castalia Cemetery’s monument? $2,500. This didn’t account for the $500 needed to prepare the site and create the monument’s foundation, though, so the true cost was $3,000. The dedication took place in