Family Life

01.09.09 | FL News Team

Cutting through a cornfield where soldiers were killed on the bloodiest day of the Civil War, a hiker spied something near a groundhog hole: fragments of bone and a metal button, clotted with red clay.

He brought the remains to the visitors center at Antietam National Battlefield, where they were turned over to experts who made a stunning discovery: They belonged to a Union soldier from New York state.

Many of the nearly thirty-seven hundred soldiers killed in the pivotal 1862 battle were buried in nearby cemeteries five years later, but the New York soldier’s remains were somehow overlooked until now. The soldier’s identity may remain a mystery.

Howard said he was young, probably between nineteen and twenty-one, based on the condition of teeth in a recovered jawbone. A National Park Service archaeologist and Smithsonian Institution anthropologist were the ones who confirmed he was a soldier.