The story of General Alexander Schimmelfennig is one of the oddities of the Battle of Gettysburg. On the evening of July 1, 1863, after the first day’s fighting rolled up the Union line north of town, the Union general slipped into the tight maze of alleys and back lots along Baltimore Street—now behind Confederate lines—and simply vanished. For nearly three days, he stayed hidden in the rear of a civilian property, close enough to hear voices and boots in the street, close enough to smell the animals and the woodpile, and with no real way to know whether the Union army was still there at all.

That general was Alexander Schimmelfennig. The family whose property sheltered him were the Henry and Catherine Polly Little Garlach household, whose home and shop complex stretched across what later became 319–323 Baltimore Street.

The basic shape of the hiding story has stayed consistent in retellings: he was trapped during the retreat toward Cemetery Hill; he ended up concealed behind the Garlachs’ kitchen-side shed area near a hog pen; and Mrs. Garlach fed him in a way that looked ordinary—because feeding hogs was ordinary.

A Prussian Revolutionary Turned Union General

Schimmelfennig’s “where he came from” story starts a long way from Pennsylvania. He was born in Bromberg, in Prussia (today Bydgoszcz, Poland), and he came of age in the political storms of the 1840s.

One reason he’s interesting—beyond the famous hideout—is that he belonged to the wave of German-speaking political refugees who arrived in the United States after the failed revolutions of 1848–49. In that world, soldiering and politics weren’t separate lanes. He served with revolutionary forces in the Palatinate struggle, lived in exile, and moved in the same circles as other émigrés who later wore Union blue.

A small but telling personal detail comes from Carl Schurz, who later commanded Eleventh Corps troops at Gettysburg and wrote about the war years in The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz. Schurz remembered Schimmelfennig as the Prussian officer who had given him military instruction in Zürich back in the winter of 1849–50—years before they met again as Union officers.

By the time the American Civil War arrived, Schimmelfennig was living in the United States and was tied into the German-American community and its politics. Later memorial language (and later biographical summaries) emphasize that he “wrote his name” into American service despite being foreign-born—an idea that mattered a lot in an era when German units were regularly sneered at by nativists.

How He Came to Gettysburg, and How He Got Cut Off

On June 30, 1863, the Eleventh Corps marched hard toward Gettysburg. Schurz—writing as a corps/division commander—described moving from the Emmitsburg area toward town without knowing they were marching into the war’s most famous three-day fight.

When the Eleventh Corps arrived, Schurz notes that “General Schimmelfennig” was temporarily commanding the corps’ Third Division during the initial deployment north of town.

That first day ended the way Gettysburg’s first day so often ended: a stubborn retreat through town. Schurz pushes back on the old caricature that the Union simply dissolved into a stampede; in his telling, there were stragglers (as always), but units continued to fall back and reorganize. He does, however, acknowledge a brutal truth that matters for the hiding story: in the crush of streets and dead-ends, many men—including Schimmelfennig—were forced into alleys and blind lanes and were either captured or nearly captured.

Schimmelfennig’s own escape—again, as Schurz records it—was a split-second blend of luck and nerve. He got crowded into a lane, hit a fence, dismounted, and tried to climb over. Confederate infantry were so close behind that one struck him on the head with a musket butt; Schimmelfennig dropped down the far side and played dead (helped by the fact that an overcoat hid his insignia). The Confederates passed him by, thinking he was just another man down.

Garlach House and the Family Who Lived There

The people who owned that yard were not “background characters” in their own lives. They were working-town civilians with a business literally attached to their home.

Catherine Polly Little Garlach—born Catherine Polly Little—came from local roots. One well-sourced local narrative traces her “Little” surname back to German immigrants who anglicized “Klein” into “Little,” and notes a Revolutionary War veteran ancestor (Andrew Klein) in that family line.

She married Henry Garlach in 1840 at St. James Lutheran Church when she was eighteen and he was twenty-three. The same account says Henry’s father (also named John Henry) lived with them until his death in 1851.

By 1855, Henry owned the half-acre Baltimore Street lot that would become famous. The place was a hybrid: family living space up front (and across the attached buildings) and a working cabinetmaker’s shop and wood supply behind.

Their oldest child, Anna Louisa Garlach Kitzmiller, was eighteen in 1863. In the National Park Service telling, she carried a lot of responsibility—helping with younger siblings and even attending Rebecca Eyster’s Female Academy just a block away.

It’s also worth picturing the house the way the family experienced it: as shelter, yes, but not a perfect one. Both local and NPS accounts say their cellar had standing water (about a foot), forcing the family to improvise platforms and dry footing—using the shop’s wood—so they could shelter below when bullets and sharpshooters made the upper floors dangerous.

Three Days Behind Enemy Lines, Told from Both Sides of the Fence

If you want the most “in his own words” version we can get, Schurz’s memoir is gold because it preserves the story Schimmelfennig told soon after he reappeared.

Schurz writes that Schimmelfennig crawled into a small stable or shed in a kitchen garden and found scraps that seemed meant for pigs—hardly a meal, but it kept him alive. He lay there from the afternoon of July 1 until early July 4, hiding while Confederate troops occupied the town. The physical discomfort (hunger and thirst) was bad, but in Schurz’s retelling the mental torture was worse: Schimmelfennig could hear the battle swell and fade without knowing who held the advantage or whether the Union army had abandoned Gettysburg entirely.

The civilian view lines up with that general outline, but adds the backyard geography. The National Park Service page on Anna Garlach says she observed Schimmelfennig hiding near the pig pen in the family’s backyard, “between the barrel and rank of wood from the evening of the first day to the morning of July 4th.”

The same NPS account also stresses what was happening inside the house: more than one family crowding together, beds made on the floor to avoid stray fire, and civilians constantly fearing that sharpshooters would seize the attic (which could invite a direct attack on the building).

So where does Mrs. Garlach fit in?

Multiple sources make her the hinge-point. A widely repeated marker text (preserved online) says Schimmelfennig avoided capture because he hid for three days behind a stack of firewood and a hog slop barrel along the front of the kitchen woodshed, and that he was sustained with food and water that Mrs. Garlach delivered to him while feeding the hogs.

A longer local narrative adds color: Catherine discovers him while doing the daily hog-feeding routine, then uses that same routine as cover to hand him bread and water.

When dawn came on July 4, Schurz says the kitchen garden finally went quiet; Schimmelfennig emerged and entered the home, where the inhabitants first reacted with fear and then with “glee” once they understood. That moment—crowded, awkward, relieved—feels very Gettysburg.

And then there’s one more detail that ties the general’s family directly into the Gettysburg civilian story: Schurz notes that it was “a happy moment” when he could telegraph to “Mrs. Schimmelfennig” (he places her in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with his own family) that her husband—reported missing after July 1—had been found safe.

What Happened after the Battle, and how the Story Kept Growing

Schimmelfennig lived through Gettysburg, but not by many years. Later retellings agree that his post-Gettysburg service took him south, and that his health never truly recovered.

One popular local history post summarizes the arc this way: Schimmelfennig served in the Carolinas later in the war, accepted Charleston’s surrender February 18, 1865, and then died on September 5, 1865. A contemporaneous-looking order reproduced in an Official Records compilation also shows the Union army formally placing Charleston “under the command of Brigadier-General Schimmelfennig” that same day—February 18, 1865—underscoring that he wasn’t merely present; he held responsibility there.

Because he died just months after the war ended, the question “what did he think about all this after the war?” has a frustrating answer: he didn’t have much “after the war” time. What we do have is that striking Gettysburg memory—his anxious three days in hiding, and the way he told it over breakfast to Schurz.

The Garlachs’ timeline is clearer in the local record. Henry Garlach returned after the battle and continued working; he later partnered in business with a son (William) until Henry’s death in 1887, and Catherine, widowed and aging, moved out to stay with family in town until her own death in 1893.

Their daughter Anna Louisa Garlach Kitzmiller married Jacob Kitzmiller and had two daughters, and she stayed in town for the rest of her life, dying in 1919.

The property itself had its own “afterlife.” The front buildings (the 319–323 block) remained, but the most famous parts of the hiding story—the shed/hog-pen area behind—didn’t last forever. In 1905 the famous shed and hog pen were finally razed after years of wear; by then the site had become a recognizable local landmark.

That 1905 date matters for another reason: it’s also the era when the story starts to harden into public memory. A Gettysburg College blog post notes that Anna published her own account of the battle in the Gettysburg Compiler in 1905—telling her story decades later, as she remembered it. In other words, the hiding incident wasn’t only a “battle legend” told by outsiders; it was being placed into print by a woman who lived it.

As for contact between the families after the war, the best lead in the sources I could access is indirect but meaningful. The Schurz narrative says that after Schimmelfennig’s death, some of his relatives came to visit Catherine, asked to see the exact spot (shed, barrels, woodpile), took pictures, and left—suggesting the general had told the story within his own family. The Gettysburg College blog post echoes a similar tradition: that Schimmelfennig’s descendants later visited and were shown where he had hidden. Neither source gives a precise date for that visit, so the safest way to say it is: there’s local tradition, tied to Anna’s later storytelling, that the connection didn’t end on July 4.

In the late twentieth century, the story moved from “local memory” to something tourists can’t miss. A wayside marker titled “A Union General Escapes Capture” was installed in the downtown marker program in 1999, and (according to a 2024 progress report) it was slated for replacement as part of a broader marker refresh. The marker text—reproduced online and photographed—keeps the interpretation tight: cabinetmaker’s shop, firewood stack, hog slop barrel, three days hidden, Catherine feeding hogs as cover.

One last note, because it’s easy to miss: in the National Park Service telling, the Garlachs’ yard also brushes up against another Gettysburg narrative thread. Anna recorded that Confederate soldiers asked to use shop wood to make a coffin for one of their generals, and that, in her account, the unfinished coffin later became the coffin used for Jennie Wade, the battle’s only civilian fatality. Whether every step of that chain can be proven from surviving records, it shows how civilians stitched meaning together from whatever remained in the aftermath—wood, barrels, cellars, and all.