The Codori farm, lying north of the Sherfy farm and astride the Emmitsburg Road just south of Gettysburg, was one of the most significant landmarks in Pickett’s Charge. On July 3, 1863, thousands of Confederate soldiers crossed the Codori fields as they advanced toward the Union line at the Angle. The farmstead, with its stone house and large barns, stood directly in the path of the assault and quickly became a focal point of the fighting. When the charge collapsed under withering Union fire, the fields around the Codori farm were strewn with dead and wounded Confederates. The proximity to the road and the sheer number of casualties made the farm one of the most logical and necessary sites for mass burials.
Burial crews—Union soldiers, local residents pressed into service, and even some Confederate prisoners—interred hundreds of men on or near the Codori property in the days following the battle. Accounts suggest that bodies were laid in long trenches on both sides of the Emmitsburg Road, with some graves directly in the fields where men had fallen. The convenience of the location was critical: wagons carrying the dead from the swath of Pickett’s Charge and other parts of the Confederate line could easily reach the farm, and the level fields provided open ground for large pits. The Codori site thus became one of the largest concentrations of Confederate burials on the southern half of the battlefield. Various estimates suggest that as many as five hundred burials occurred here.
Just a short distance farther south along the Emmitsburg Road stood the Sherfy farm, famous for its peach orchard. On July 2, the orchard became the centerpiece of a bloody contest between Longstreet’s assaulting Confederates and the Union III Corps. The Sherfy property, like Codori’s, was caught in the center of heavy fighting and suffered terribly. When the combat ended, its fields and orchards too were littered with bodies. Burial trenches were dug there much as they were at Codori—close to the road, near the orchards and fencerows where men had fallen. For both properties, their prominent positions along the Emmitsburg Road made them natural gathering points for the dead.
For the Codori and Sherfy families, the aftermath was grimly similar. Both households returned to find their barns used as field hospitals, their crops trampled and burned, and their land scarred by shallow graves. In the years after the war, Confederate remains were repeatedly unearthed on both farms as crews disinterred bodies for reburial in Southern cemeteries. Newspaper reports well into the late nineteenth century describe bones surfacing in Codori’s fields and in Sherfy’s orchard, reminders of how these farmsteads had unwillingly become vast cemeteries in the summer of 1863.
The following list is much shorter than those of the George Rose farm, the John Edward Plank farm, or the Francis Bream farm. The Plank and Bream farms were significant field hospitals that kept treating the wounded and burying men for days after the battle. The Rose farm lay in close proximity to the Bushman and Weikert farms where similar treatment of the wounded and dying took place. The Codori and Sherfy farms were too centered in the fighting, and the treatment of wounded lasted much less time. The dead there were buried quickly, most without records associated with them. They were then largely removed in 1872 and years thereafter. As with other burial pages, Find-a-Grave links are provided where known.
Joseph R. Terrell
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