Welcome you all to the Battlefields Foundation roundtable, guide you are all able to make it. Its going to be a very interesting, top were going to hear this evening. Remember, we do not have dues, but we do ask that everyone who comes to the roundtable become a member of the Shadow ValleyBattlefields Foundation. Just to know a little bit about the foundation, we have close to 5000 acres, of civil battlefield that weve been able to preserve, please go to our website, and if you could, we would surely appreciate you becoming a member of the foundation. Im going to introduce our speaker tonight, steve and i both move to the area about the same time. Steve came from a career in music, he is a graduate of Berkeley College of music. For many many years he toured worldwide, he came back to his roots in pennsylvania. He decided to study this battle, he didnt just study it, he was engrossed in it. He has done remarkable, thorough research as, thorough as anyone could do, to put together a book, with rare images, the book was released on the anniversary of the battle, on september 17th 2012. It really was a labor of love, the finest research you could conduct on a book, he is a very very close friend, he was very polite when i sent my invitation to speak tonight. It was belie pleasure to do so. Thank you very much. Its a great honor to be here and have the opportunity to talk about antietam. Nick is right. I did start out as a professional guitar player. This kind of reminds me of those days with the lights, but it is a lot quieter. About 1993, i got the opportunity to work with apple computer, and they were just getting digital video started. I was producing the quicktime cdrom. As part of that, i was getting into quicktime vr, and i ended up doing a cdrom called virtual gettysburg, an interactive tour of the battlefield. The first thing i did was try to get as many rare photographs of the battlefield as i could find. It is not that hard to find rare images of gettysburg if you have a little money and time. There is all kinds of opportunities to find rare images of gettysburg. I made that cdrom, then i moved out here to western maryland to work on virtual antietam. But virtual antietam was a lot harder task, because to try to find rare images was really difficult, and i had no idea how to go about it at the time. The shows i would go to, there would not be any photographs. Ebay had not really happened yet, so there was nowhere to find it. So i started collecting rare postcards. Most of the postcards started around 1905, and i found that some early antietam photographs from the 1880s were on some of these early postcards. I managed to buy the postcard collection of a photographer and historian from antietam, and he had this beautiful trove of postcards he had passed on to his son. I ended up buying that set of postcards. Then his son said, would you like to see my dads photographs . I said, absolutely. So i went over to his house and he pulled out these boxes of photographs. They were crammed in willynilly. As a collector, that is what you want. Someone has photographs that you have an opportunity to buy. If they are nicely categorized, you know they have been gone through and there is not a lot to discover. But these have been crammed into a box for years, shoved into the back of a closet. This was the first time anyone had seen them. He put them on this table, and it was really an amazing moment for me because we sat there for two hours going through the photographs. There were drawings on the back from the 1800s about where the photograph was taken and there were amazing images i had never seen. I ended up being able to buy that entire collection, and it was at that point i thought i was on my way to finding beautiful images. Once i had those, i started to be really lucky finding other photographs of antietam, and other collectors were interested in talking to me because i had interesting stuff to show them, and things really took off. Finally i found a few images i thought were very rare that solved some mysteries i had not even been looking for. It reminded me of an Alfred Hitchcock movie, where in the beginning it is not a typical movie where someone is killed and somebody tries to figure out what happened. Somebody is on a train, they are just sitting there, had they solve a murder mystery, and they are stuck on this wild ride because they know the answer to this mystery. It was kind of like that with the photographs that i found. When i realized i had some really exciting stuff, i decided to write a book. Virtual antietam kind of went by the wayside. Instead of doing the technology. Rare images of antietam came to life. I worked on this for eight years, really trying to dig into rare images of antietam. About two years before this book came out, i found out that the very first photograph taken on the Antietam Battlefield this was after Alexander Gardner left. He leaves in october 1862, and the photographs taken after that. The first photograph taken of Antietam National battlefield has this as the background. A photographer named e. M. Recher. On this, it is spelled recker, which is my last name. His actual name is spelled recher, but he anglicized it. Very often he would spell it with a k. I discovered that the first photograph taken had a back mark of my name. I have never met anybody except my immediate family that has a last name of recker, and hear the first photograph of antietam had my name. I spend a couple of years trying to prove that wrong. There is no way, it is too easy. I was actually able to not disprove this. I did find a picture of e. M. Recher. You see the resemblance, the nice chiseled jaw and the big hair. This is him about 1855. He moved to hagerstown. He was born in wilsonville. He got married and moved to hagerstown about 1855, and he sort of became the patriarch of what is commonly known as the hagerstown artists. You have to understand photography did not really become a thing until the 1840s, so this is a very new technology. They did not call themselves photographers. They called themselves artists. There were four hagerstown artists that have a lot to do with early photographs at antietam. E. M. Recher was the patriarch. A young intern of his called b. W. T. Phreaner, who became the most prolific antietam photographer had a studio for over 40 years. And there was a guy, john wagoner, who originally had a shop in Boones Borough and moved to hagerstown. And w. B. King, a photographer more around the 1890s. Those are the four main guys, but he was the big guy. He had a house in wolf sville. In the corner, you see recker. His family even on the deed spells it recker. This is the original log cabin that was on the site. This is where e. M. Recher was born. This is him with his son john, and he has got a nice old beard there. That is the typical way he looked in most of his later photographs. I have an eightyearold son named henry and he comes around with me when i investigate where photographs were taken. What i would always see with these pictures, whenever there is a portrait of e. M. Recher or he is taking a picture of some seen, his son always seems to be in the picture. I never understood that. I thought maybe sometimes people like to get a person in the picture because people like to see people in the pictures. But what i realized is it probably took him four hours to get to that spot on a wagon, and his son was in the wagon for four hours. He is taking pictures, he is not going to be able to get his son out of the picture. I found out myself when we found a spot, my son wants to be in the picture. That is when i realized that good old john is in a lot of these shots. This is hagerstown square. Hi Rock Entertainment is on the top floor. When this book came out, i was working for high rock. Interestingly enough, e. M. Rechers original studio camera was white where i was on the third floor of that building. Weird connections. But i dont believe we are related. This is the first photograph, the actual front of the recher photograph, and this is the philip fry house. This is mcclellans headquarters, or according to someone, it was hookers headquarters and mcclellan spent some time there. Some people believe this was taken before the war, before the battle. I am not so sure. This is an e. M. Recher photograph. E. M. Recher had his studio in the town of figures down. Town of hagerstown. The 13th massachusetts came there in december of 1861, and one of the boys wrote, to his wife, saying, we went to hagerstown to get a picture taken and recher did not have the equipment to take a picture in the street, so we had to cram into his studio to take the photograph. In 1861, e. M. Recher could not get his equipment down on the street, i cannot imagine he would get his camera 12 miles away to take a picture of a nondescript farm. It does not make any sense. What makes more sense is that after the battle when this became the headquarters of the union army in the most amazing thing that ever happened in this area, it would make more sense he would have a photograph taken here. Lets take a look at what evidence we might see that would support that. This is Alexander Gardners picture, taken the day after the battle. If you look at the tree on the left, it arcs up and is a little thin. Same with this one here. The there is one just like those that says september 18. I am not saying it was taken september 17, i am thinking closer to october. Still, the trees are going to be pretty close. You can see the windows in the front door open about the same, so probably the same time of year. I think these are probably a little bit closer, that it would have been taken in 1862. This is another one of the same sort of series. The trees on the top are very similar. I will cycle through the three of these. The trees look pretty much the same. What i put together in my head is that e. M. Recher goes down there, want to take a picture of the house for his own use, and philip and samuel pry say, we will make you a deal, take a picture of us and you can take a picture for your own use. I dont have any evidence, but it makes sense. So this is the picture he took for the family and this is the picture he used commercially. I have another one like this taken of the burnside bridge. I have only seen like five cbds of the battlefield. The spohn farm is up on the hill, but that is 1868, so it would not have been taken then. I cant believe this would be 1868 and that they would be a match, so i believe of the two, this cbd being earlier than the stereo view, i think this is closer to 1862 than the other one. I think this is the first picture taken after the battlefield. If anybody has questions about that later, you can talk to me about it and see what kind of evidence we can get. This is what it looks like today, very well maintained, not as rustic, but still very beautiful. This is another photograph i found. This is keatings bill keatingsville battlefield hotel. I do believe it says battlefield hotel. On the back, it says house in which i lay wounded after antietam. 1862, nicodemus mills, maryland, in the hand of general crawford. Crawford had a brigade in the cornfield and he is notorious for having been shot in the thigh. A lot of people thought he shot himself. A year later at gettysburg, he earned renown for charging the pennsylvania reserves down into the valley of death, and he really had a feeling for gettysburg after that. In fact, he bought part of devils den and named it crawford park. So i think maybe he did not think or know that much about antietam. I believe 1884, he goes back and gives the memorial address at antietam at the cemetery that year. I think somebody gave him this card and he said, that looks just like where i was wounded after the battle. Because if you look at this, this is nicodemus mills. Lets say that is nicodemus mills. Get a look at the house, two floors, a porch on the top and bottom. On the right, the building goes all the way back, so it is probably in a town because there is all those buildings, instead of spread out like on a farm. That is nicodemus mills today. If you look at this, the house looks similar. The windows and doors dont match up exactly. To the right is a stone house that predates the brick part. Obviously at the time of the battle, the brick building was never there alone, so i have not been able to find this. I put it in the book because i spent good money on it and wanted to write it off on my taxes. Nonetheless, it is in there. It has crawfords writing on the back but i have not been able to figure out where it is and i have been looking for 15 years, so that is still a mystery. This is david back rock david bock rock David Bachrach, a photo dog river out of baltimore, famous for having photograph president s. He took the only known photograph of Abraham Lincoln doing the gettysburg address. He was a young kid, and a photographer named yeager in baltimore hired him. They took the photographs. Right away without really thinking about it, he clave he gave the negatives to the woodcut artist and they left. That is how unimportant they thought the gettysburg address was at the time. Today of course we think that is an amazing thing. We hold those photographs very dear of lincoln at gettysburg. David bockachrach also took this photograph. This is lincoln at gettysburg. An unknown photograph of lincoln giving the gettysburg address. I am going to read a little bit about this because i want to get it exactly right. In a 1963 biopic of David Bachrach, life magazine described it as lincoln being recorded in this wet plate photograph that David Bachrach helped take. Lincoln is not recognizable. David bachrachs biography captioned the photograph, gettysburg battlefield dedication ceremony, but stepped back and tepidly declared, possibly including Abraham Lincoln, 1863. This photograph, long believed to have pictured the audience awaiting his address, was taken by David Bachrach at gettysburg. But it was made six years later at a similar commemorative ceremony. Proof of this fact is in an 1863, horses and buggies were not allowed on the cemetery grounds. That was in the book of a famous lincoln photograph collector. He did not believe it was at the dedication ceremony, but he believed it was gettysburg a few years later. The reason he thought that was because there were all those wagons. Finally in 1999, christies auction to the David Bachrach family copy of this for 16,100. The auction stated it was the gettysburg battlefield dedication ceremony, 1863, and cited bacharachs biography. Well, this is not gettysburg and that is not lincoln. This is the 1867 dedication of the Antietam National cemetery, long after Abraham Lincoln is dead. My wife asked me, how can you put that in your book, how can you prove it . You just get as much evidence as you can and make the case. Lets see what kind of evidence i have for that kind of a claim. This is the 1867 harpers weekly, and this 1867 harpers weekly, and this says the antietam dedication of says the antietam dedication of the ceremony from a picture by the ceremony from a picture by David Bachrach. You see the bandstand. You see the gate in the front. And you see all the different wooden temporary markers. In the background, you also see south mountain. This is a close up. If i were to look at this and find something to really key in on, what would i look at . If you look halfway down on the right, you will see a little fence. Lets see if we can find this fence. This is the fence at antietam. There is a finial, a dot, a finial, and a little thing poking up. You also see down at the bottom, there are stones. A lighter stone over the top of a longer piece. That is it today. These are the three types of fence its at gettysburg, the only types that have ever been gettysburg. In 1863, there were no fences. This looks exactly like it. This is where i believe this was taken. You see the steps down to the bottom are exactly the same. This is what it looks like at gettysburg, the actual photograph of lincoln at gettysburg. This is a photograph this is another copy of the photograph at antietam. What do you see in the background . Why do you recognize in the distance . South mountain. That would have to be culps hill in the background if this were gettysburg, and it is not. It is nowhere near that high. These are the temporary wooden markers at antietam. They put those markers in five years after the battle. At gettysburg, they buried the dead that november. Abraham lincoln came out, dedicated the National Cemetery, and got them buried pretty much right away. At antietam, we were still in war for a few years until the end of the civil war, so they did not have a chance to bury the union dead until five years after the battle. They did not bury the confederate dead for 10 years after the battle. Think about that. One day there were 3500 dead, another 3500 that would die within two weeks. That is 7000 dead all over the place, many of them not buried for five years or even 10 years. What they did in 1867, the war was over and they finally decided to start getting things together. They hired a silversmith out of hagerstown named thomas bold to get the National Cemetery together, and they put these temporary markers. They took these markers these were the original markers from all over maryland, hagerstown and brunswick and cumberland and frederick. All over the place, they had bodies that were varied there, and they dug them up and buried them at antietam. Until i found this, there was never a photograph of these original wooden markers. I found this a few years before i published this, and i was very excited because you see there are all different types of markers. In the original woodcut, they all look the same, the ovalshaped. But there are all kinds of different ones. The square ones are from frederick, maryland, at the markers in front of them that look like a typical tombstone are from the smoke town hospital. They move them from all over the state to the battlefield. This is the battlefield itself. The first thing you do when you find a rare photograph, as a photo historian, you go out, you try to find exactly where this was. I wanted to see if i could find when this was taken, because you can see they stopped the front row, stop burying them right there, and i wanted to find the records to find out when this was taken, where this was taken. It could have been late 1866 or early 1867. So i lined myself up and put these two stones ri