Military History | Observation Tower, Antietam — The Field the Government Did Not Buy

On 26 November 1895 the Secretary of War, Daniel S. Lamont, submitted his annual report to the President and used part of it to argue that the country was preserving its battlefields the wrong way. By his accounting, associations and the states had put about $1,500,000 into Gettysburg, and the government had taken some 6,000 acres into federal hands at Chickamauga. Extended to every field that mattered, he wrote, the park model meant fifty places and "at least $20,000,000."

At Antietam — Sharpsburg in the other army's usage — the department had been left "absolute discretion," and had spent it differently. It bought about seventeen acres, not in a block but in strips "conforming closely to the actual battle lines," ran five miles of metaled road along them, and set some two hundred iron tablets at the roadside. The farms on either side stayed private. Lamont's sentence is flat: the field, "instead of being converted into a park, is substantially in the same condition as when the battle was fought, and is likely to remain so for years." Land and roads together came to roughly $40,000. He asked Congress to mark every remaining field this way, for $100,000 in all.

The holding grew; the board's 1898 report put it slightly past twenty-two and a half acres. So that a visitor could see a battlefield the government had declined to own, the War Department raised a masonry tower at the eastern angle of the Sunken Road, or Bloody Lane. The Evening Star found it half-built in September 1896 and expected fifty-two feet; later accounts say nearer sixty.

From the top the argument is still legible. A ribbon of federal road, tablets along the shoulder, and corn to the treeline that nobody ever bought.

📸 Cover: the observation tower at the east end of Richardson Avenue, Antietam National Battlefield (Acroterion, 2016, CC BY-SA 4.0). Second image: the view north-northeast from the tower, over ground the government did not buy (Mr. Matté, 2025, CC BY-SA 4.0).