Biography|Israel B. Richardson — Six Weeks in a Bedroom at Headquarters

Israel Bush Richardson was hit near the Sunken Road on 17 September 1862. Born in Fairfax, Vermont, in 1815, he had the First Division of the Union Second Corps, and the accounts of his wounding never quite settle: the National Park Service's own pages have him directing artillery fire, bringing up more guns, and leading a brigade forward. The National Museum of Civil War Medicine cites two officers who saw the wound and did not agree — Colonel Edward Cross put it in the breast, Lieutenant Thomas Livermore in the side.

He was carried first to Samuel Pry's mill, then up to Philip Pry's brick farmhouse above Antietam Creek, which the Army of the Potomac had taken from the family days before the battle and which George B. McClellan used as headquarters through it. The Park Service describes how the ground was then divided: the barn held enlisted men waiting for transfer to Frederick, most of them from Richardson's own division, and the house took officers. Richardson was given a bedroom upstairs.

He was there forty-seven days. Lincoln spent four days at Antietam in early October, and both the Park Service and the museum that long ran the house say he went in to see him; the promise Lincoln is supposed to have made — that Richardson would have the army if he recovered — comes from one staff officer's recollection. Richardson died in the house on 3 November 1862. Whether it was the wound's infection or the pneumonia is stated both ways.

An electrical fire took the staircase, a parlour and the large upstairs bedroom in 1976, and the Park Service rebuilt them the following year. The house still stands, a red hospital flag at the corner of its lawn. The National Museum of Civil War Medicine, which ran it for years as a field hospital museum, gave up administering it in the summer of 2026; no successor operator or public hours have been announced.

📸 Cover: The Pry House, Antietam National Battlefield, near Keedysville, Maryland, 22 September 2019 — photo by Acroterion, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.