Tag: Adams County Almshouse
-
Blocher’s Knoll and Barlow’s Knoll
If you drive the northern edge of the Gettysburg battlefield today, you might pass Barlow’s Knoll without thinking much about it. It is not Little Round Top. It does not tower over the fields. It is simply a gentle rise in farmland near Rock Creek. Yet on July 1, 1863, this quiet swell of ground…
-
Samuel K. Foulk: The Carriage Maker who Helped Raise Young James A. Wade
Samuel K. Foulk (born March 22, 1827, in Perry County, Pennsylvania – died April 25, 1910, in Huntington Township, Adams County) was a craftsman-entrepreneur who lived most of his adult life in Gettysburg, Adams County. Best known as a carriage maker and blacksmith, Foulk later in life also farmed the land. He witnessed the upheaval…
-
From Union Soldier to Outcast: The Downfall of Isadore Keefer
In the tumultuous decades around the Civil War, the lives of three Adams County residents – Isadore Keefer, Caroline Shanabrook (later Wolford), and John Wolford – became unexpectedly intertwined. Their story, marked by war, scandal, and survival, offers a window into mid-19th-century life, morals, and policing in the Gettysburg area.
-
Farmer, Tailor, Soldier, Poet: The Life of James A. Wade, Half-Brother of Jennie Wade
The life of James A. Wade started as a crime. It continued into the worst poverty—time in the Adams County Almshouse and a period of being bonded out. Then it pivoted to the Civil War, which was made worse by the death of his sister, Jennie Wade. And for all that, Jim, as he was…
-
Jacob Culp: Steward of Adams County Alms House
Jacob Culp was related to the other Culps featured on this site. All of them descended from the German couple Christophel Kolb and Maria Caterina Leise. Their name became Culp within a generation, and one of the children of that couple owned the farm that included the hill now known as Culp’s Hill. Jacob was…
-
1840s Jennie Wade: The Skellys and the Almshouse
The best-remembered of the family, Jennie Wade, was the third child born to Captain James Wade and his wife Mary Ann. The couple’s first child died in infancy; in 1841, Georgeanna was born, followed by Jennie in 1843. Captain Wade was a native Virginian with connections to a prominent family there and ancestry that had…
-
1840s: The Crimes of Captain James Wade
One of Gettysburg’s most prominent ghosts, supposedly, is Captain James Wade who, according to legend, is frustrated that he was not on hand when his daughter Jennie was killed during the battle. If you take a ghost tour, you will learn that Captain Wade was in the Adams County Almshouse during the battle. Captain Wade’s…