The Norris-Wachob Alumni House
"Some eighteen wounded of the 1st Corps were carried to the splendid mansion of the Professor [Baugher]. Day and night the family were unremitting in their attention to the wants of the sufferers." — David Weaver, 90th Pennsylvania
When Confederate troops occupied the Gettysburg College campus on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, College President Dr. Baugher and his family found themselves in Confederate territory. Even so, the family risked imprisonment to harbor wounded Union soldiers in their on-campus home, known as the White House. Despite repeated searches, the soldiers went undetected.
One of the men in the Baughers' care, Private George Kimball of the 12th Massachusetts, later praised the family, especially the President's daughter Alice. Though shells were frequently bursting about the grounds, the fragments were frequently bursting about the grounds, the fragments crashing against the walls of the building and tearing limbs from trees in the yard," Kimball wrote, Alice "paused not in her noble work nor shrank from any danger, however great."
Other College faculty members risked similarly dangers to help the wounded. From their home on the town square, Professor Martin Stoever and his family fed hungry soldiers out of their backyard and sheltered wounded Union
men in their dining room and cellar. Professor Charles Schaeffer cared for Frederick Lehmann, a young student in the College's Preparatory Division who was wounded outside Schaeffer's home on Chambersburg Street.
The battle had turned homes into hospitals and civilians into medics. It would take the town and the College months to recover from the vast damage inflicted during the three-day battle. Still the faculty later asserted that they "would be willing to suffer the same thing over again for the same cause."
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Michael Jacobs
Professor Michael Jacobs provided one of the first eye-witness accounts of the Battle of Gettysburg. Jacobs monitored the battle from his home at 101 West Middle Street, all the while taking copious notes. Within months of the battle, he published
Notes on the Rebel Invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania and the Battle of Gettysburg, a book compiled from his observations. The account quickly became a valuable primary source and established Gettysburg College's longstanding tradition of premier Civil War scholarship.
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The "White House" (now the Norris-Wachob Alumni House), shown in the foreground, first housed Dr. Baugher and his family in 1860. It is one of two surviving Civil War-era buildings on campus.
Dr. Baugher, also a Lutheran minister, gave the benediction of the dedication of Soldiers National Cemetery which followed President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
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