48 East Patrick Street Frederick
“Bringing the Story of War to Our Doorsteps: Rediscovering Alexander Gardner’s Antietam Photographs”
A special exhibit at the
National Museum of Civil War Medicine
For the first time since the Civil War, Mathew Brady’s famous 1862 photographic exhibition “The Dead of Antietam,” will be exhibited at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, in Frederick, MD. A partnership among the Museum, the Frederick County Civil War Roundtable, and Hood College has recreated the original photographs of battlefield dead captured by Alexander Gardner after the battle of Antietam. During the Civil War, Gardner’s photography revolutionized how the public would see the human cost of war.
On September 17, 1862, Union and Confederate armies clashed at the small town of Sharpsburg, MD. The battle left more than 23,000 Americans killed, wounded, or missing, making it the bloodiest day in United States history. Two days later, Mathew Brady’s photographer Alexander Gardner and his assistant James Gibson began photographing the battlefield and the soldiers who had died. By October 6th, 1862, Brady had these photographs on display and ready for sale at his New York City gallery.
“The living that throng Broadway care little perhaps for the Dead at Antietam, but we fancy they would jostle less carelessly down the great thoroughfare, saunter less at their ease, were a few dripping bodies, fresh from the field, laid along the pavement.
Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.”
New York Times October 20, 1862
“Bringing the Story of war to our Doorsteps,” was initially hosted at the Pry House Field Hospital Museum, the National Museum of Civil War Medicine’s satellite museum at Antietam National Battlefield, during October and November. The exhibit has been so popular that the Museum decided to extend its duration and bring it to downtown Frederick, MD.
“This has been a memorable experience,” said event organizer Robert Kozak. “We have restaged the original exhibit so people can experience what viewers saw 150 years ago.” Display prints have been made to the same dimensions and style of the originals from high-definition Library of Congress digital files. “We are also privileged to have on display several original Gardner photos from the collection of Robert Zeller,” said Kozak.