The Lost Confederate Grave of Wildcat Falls

 

It's impossible to say how many generations have been enchanted by the beauty of Wildcat Falls in York County, a short distance from the village of Accomac, but it is known that hundreds of years ago the Susquehannock tribe had a village here, where Wildcat Run cuts a magnificent gorge through the rocky hills before taking a 150-foot plunge on its short course to the Susquehanna at a point across the river upstream from Marietta. It was here, on the site of the old Indian village, where a hotel was erected in the late 19th century.

Though largely forgotten today, the Wildcat Falls Hotel was a local landmark which featured prominently on picture postcards of the era, and rose to prominence under the ownership of Rea Engle and Norman Pickle (who owned the famous Accomac Inn at the time), who purchased to property in the early 20th century. During this period, cottages and cabins were erected along River Road, and the locale became a popular weekend getaway for many York and Lancaster County residents. 

 

 

It also became a popular destination for the movers and shakers from across Pennsylvania; in 1906, the highly-exclusive Wildcat Falls Club was formed, and its membership included the likes of senators E.K. McConkey and Boies Penrose. But when the club lowered its dues to $15 in the early 1920s (which was still a tidy sum of money at the time) the club lost much of its luster, and the upper crust abandoned Wildcat Falls for snobbier surroundings. The hotel, whose named had been changed to the Glen Orchard Hotel, was closed in 1924 and sold to a group of attorneys who formed the Blackstone Club, a private haven for members of the Lancaster County Bar Association. When the Blackstone Club burned down a few years later, the site was abandoned.

But even after the last traces of the once-prestigious hotel had disappeared, there were still a few locals who kept a close watch on the grounds. One of them was George Wilson, who purchased the Loray Pines cottage in 1939. It was Wilson who, for decades, upheld a little-known local tradition-- decorating the grave of an unknown Confederate soldier who was hastily buried at Wildcat Falls.

 

 

The Burning of the Wrightsville Bridge
 

By June of 1863, the Confederate Army had marched into Pennsylvania lock, stock and barrel, capturing the city of York and turning an eye north to the state capital. With Harrisburg his objective, Confederate Brigadier General John Brown Gordon ordered his troops to Wrightsville, where they planned to cross the river and invade Columbia. At this point the river is a mile and a quarter wide, and the bridge connecting Wrightsville and Columbia was a wood and stone structure stretching 5,620 feet across the river, giving it the distinction of being the longest covered bridge in the world at the time.

Wrightsville, at the time, was occupied by the 27th Pennsylvania Volunteer Militia, which was under the command of Colonel Jacob G. Frick and Maj. Granville Haller. On Sunday, June 28, 1863, the 27th P.V.M. was attacked by rebel forces under the command of General Gordon, whose 1,800 men bombarded their enemy with a battery of cannons. Frick and Haller's regiment held out as long as they could, but the rebels outflanked them, forcing Col. Frick to retreat across the bridge into Columbia under a barrage of Confederate shells. One of the volunteer militiamen, J.B.W. Adams, wrote that Confederate sympathizers who lived in Wrightsville fired upon as they crossed the river (one unknown woman even raised a Confederate flag as the Pennsylvania militia abandoned Wrightsville). 

The Pennsylvania volunteers had expected the rebels to make an attempt to capture the bridge, and so they had taken the precaution of saturating the wooden structure with oil days earlier. They set fire to the bridge as they made their retreat to Columbia, thereby halting the Confederate advance and, ostensibly, preventing Lancaster and Harrisburg from falling into enemy hands. Miraculously, despite being heavily outnumbered and outgunned, the 27th P.V.M. suffered a single casualty during the attack on Wrightsville-- an unidentified African-American soldier from Lancaster County who was decapitated by artillery fire.

But the Confederate side also suffered a loss, and his name has been lost to history as well.

A scouting party of three Confederates reached Wrightsville before the infantry, and managed to cross the river by raft without detection under the cover of darkness. They climbed the rocks at Wildcat Falls and waited for their comrades to capture Wrightsville. Their mission was to look down on the water from their lofty perch and find the shallow places where the Confederates could ford the river if the Wrightsville bridge was destroyed by the retreating militia. Unfortunately, they discovered that fording the river was impossible-- the water had to be less than four feet deep for men to wade across. When the three scouts failed to find a shallow part of the river from their perch, they waited for nightfall before scrambling down the gorge. They got onto their raft and pushed off to report the discouraging news.

 

Wildcat Falls in Hellam Township

 

What happened next is still a matter of debate. Some sources claim that sentries stationed near Wildcat Falls spotted the rebels and fired on them, while others claim that the raft struck a rock in the river. At any rate, one of the scouts fell into the water and drowned, and his body was dragged ashore and hastily buried by his comrades.

Regimental reports indicate that neither side suffered any losses during the siege of Wrightsville, leading some to wonder if the unknown scout had not been a Confederate soldier at all, but perhaps one of the many Confederate sympathizers who lived in Wrightsville or Columbia. Yet, whether this unknown drowning victim was a brave soldier or a treasonous civilian, the Hallam Veterans of Foreign Wars erected a bronze marker at the burial site and decorated the grave every Memorial Day for several years, before the ritual was taken over by a mechanic from Columbia named Harry Sweikert.

When Sweikert moved away some years later, the tradition of decorating the grave of the unknown Confederate scout was upheld by a man by the name of Ely who owned a cottage at Wildcat Falls. When Ely sold his cottage, "Loray Pines", to George Wilson in 1939, Wilson continued the tradition for nearly two decades before he sold the cottage and moved to Wise Haven. The burial site became overgrown for a few years and remained untended until 1961, when Harry Sweikert's son-in-law, Joe Wall, obtained a flag from the Catholic War Veterans to place on the forgotten grave, which very well might be the northernmost grave of a Confederate soldier killed in action. 

 

Lost to History
 

Sadly, this historically significant grave has once again vanished into obscurity, not through neglect, but through the blinding greed of real estate developers interested only in turning a quick profit.

In 1987, a group of eight real estate investors purchased the 18-acre tract of land upon which Wildcat Falls sits from owners Robert and Patricia Farkas. This group of investors, the Wildcat Falls Association, gobbled up the historic and scenic grounds for a mere $45,000 with the intention of sub-dividing the land into building lots for luxury homes. By April of that year, dozens of trees had been bulldozed in the area where the stream empties into the river-- the exact spot where the grave of the unknown rebel scout was located-- and a barbed-wire fence was erected to deter trespassers. Hundreds more trees were destroyed to build two private roads through the scenic gorge.

"We had to build the fence to keep the vandals out," said Donald Sullenberger, one of the developers, to the Lancaster Sunday News in April of 1987. "We were also concerned about the liability of someone falling from the rocks." By this time, the falls had become notorious as a party spot for generations of local teenagers, and Sullenberger's concerns were not wholly unjustified. "The amount of litter back there was incredible," he continued. "Vandals broke the windows out of our equipment that we've left there overnight. It's just been a mess."

However, it seems that the vandalism was indicative of something much deeper than simple teenage hooliganism-- it was indicative of the indignation that ran deep in the hearts of many local residents who were devastated by the loss of a much-beloved wilderness spot. By May, dozens of petitions had begun circulating around Hellam Township, calling for an end to the land development and seeking protection for Wildcat Gorge, one of Pennsylvania's most outstanding geologic features. One petition received nearly 450 signatures over the course of three weeks. But still the bulldozers roared on, drowning out the voices of protesters.

 

 

Richard King, a Hellam Township board member, penned a letter to the York Dispatch in which he asked, "Do the Falls mean enough to anyone to attempt to preserve them for the public use of future generations? Is York so desperately in need of more six-digit figure homes at the expense of natural beauty and public use?" Apparently, the answer was 'yes'. When York County commissioners Jay Bair and William McKinley were approached by conservationists who wanted the county to consider turning the land into a park, their reply was that York County "had enough parks".

Today, the property remains in private hands, and all traces of the site's former glory have disappeared. Ironically, while conservationists spilled gallons of ink writing about the natural splendor of Wildcat Falls in their ill-fated mission to save the gorge, the fact that the land was also Civil War burial ground had been forgotten by virtually everyone in York County. Had anyone dug up the old newspaper stories about the grave of the unknown rebel scout who drowned during the Confederate occupation of Wrightsville, there's a very good chance that their preservation efforts would've been successful.






 

 

Sources:

Lancaster Sunday News, May 30, 1954.
Lancaster Sunday News, May 26, 1963.
Lancaster Sunday news, April 26, 1987.
York Dispatch, May 12, 1987.
York Daily Record, June 2, 1987.