The Human Lightning Rods of Gettysburg

A lightning victim being taken to the hospital

 

In July of 1863, a bloody battle fought near a small Pennsylvania town made the name Gettysburg famous throughout the world. Just forty-five years later, in July of 1908, tragedy would once again befall soldiers on the hallowed fields of Gettysburg. This time, the casualties would not fall by Confederate cannonballs or Union bayonets-- but by the hands of Mother Nature.

In July of 1908, the Pennsylvania National Guard held its summer encampment at Gettysburg. Camp Alexander Hays, named in honor of the Union Army general from Venango County who was killed during the Battle of the Wilderness, was opened on Thursday, July 16, with the raising of the flag and a 21-gun salute by the Third Brigade. Another salute was held for Gov. Edwin S. Stuart upon his arrival that afternoon. The Second Brigade arrived in camp in Friday, and the First Brigade on Saturday. It had been a hot, dry summer; rain hadn't fallen on the battlefield in eight weeks, and the brown grass and wheat stubble virtually crumbled to dust underfoot as the assembled regiments marched over the parched ground.

The trouble began almost as soon as the first regiments arrived on Wednesday evening, when several small fires broke out while tents were being erected. This necessitated an order to prohibit smoking on the parade grounds during the encampment, much to the chagrin of the militia men. Another cause for concern was sanitation. With food being scarce due to the drought, the flies descended upon Camp Alexander Hays in ravenous hordes; medical officers and surgeons of the Third Brigade were ordered to report to camp headquarters on Thursday morning to receive instructions intended to prevent the flies from spreading contagious germs to the camp kitchen. Despite the high risk, it was ultimately decided that all food scraps and kitchen trash would be incinerated at the end of every meal.

By the weekend, nearly ten thousand Guardsmen had assembled at Camp Alexander Hays, and the drills, parades and troop reviews proceeded as planned. On the following Tuesday, July 21, Governor Stuart reviewed the troops of Company B on the parade ground. Immediately after the review's conclusion at seven o'clock that evening, Second Lieutenant Paul J. Morley, of Company B, became the first member of the Pennsylvania National Guard since the Spanish-American War to die in camp.

While on guard duty, the 28-year-old lieutenant was standing on an iron drain pipe in front of the First Regiment tent, giving instructions to two sentries, when lightning struck, seemingly from out of nowhere. Witnesses, which included the wife and daughter of Colonel Good, the regimental commander, recalled seeing a streak of blue flame running along the length of the pipe before leaping to the unsuspecting lieutenant's sword scabbard. Captain Eidell and First Lieutenant Adams, also of Company B, placed Morley on a stretcher and carried him to the hospital tent. Dr. Charles S. Turnbull of Philadelphia labored over the unconscious soldier for two hours, but to no avail. Two other Guardsmen, Sgt. William Ruppel and Cpl. David Vint, both of Company E, suffered minor burns from the lightning blast and were also treated at the hospital tent that evening.

 
The Funeral of Lieutenant Morley

Beneath cloudless skies, members of the First Regiment gathered on Thursday afternoon to pay tribute to their fallen comrade. Colonel Good, commander of the regiment, personally made the arrangements for Paul Morley's funeral, which was held at two o'clock. In attendance was Governor Stuart. While the regimental band played a funeral dirge, the flag-draped casket was carried to the First Regiment headquarters, where services were conducted by Chaplain Hoyt of the Sixth Infantry. With their hands encased in crisp, white gloves, the khaki-clad guardsmen silently stood at attention while Chaplain Hoyt read a prayer. The emotional scene was too much for Captain Eidell and Lieutenant Adams, the two men who had carried the fallen soldier to the hospital tent. They burst into tears, and were soon joined by others.

Tragedy Strikes Again

The guardsmen did their best to carry on, and, after the funeral, the First Brigade participated in military maneuvers upon Seminary Ridge, while the members of the Second Brigade played a game of baseball. It also wasn't long before some of the older militiamen returned to playing pranks on the camp rookies. On Thursday morning, one of the new recruits appeared at First Brigade headquarters, where he had been sent by Quartermaster Stahl to requisition tent screws (which, of course, do not exist). By all accounts, the brigadier general was none too pleased and ordered the arrest of the quartermaster.

 

By this time, the camp was filled to capacity as hundreds of wives, children and family members arrived in anticipation of the closing ceremonies. And then, with the conclusion of the encampment in sight, tragedy once again reared its ugly head.

On Thursday evening , July 23, shortly after a regimental band concert, a thunderstorm unleashed its fury over the battlefield. Raging winds blew down tents, and bolts of lightning danced across the sky. Miles away, loud booms rattled windows, but the bone-rattling blasts were not from cannons. Only when ambulances and fire departments raced to the battlefield did the residents of Gettysburg understand that something truly terrible had happened.

The Governor Trapped

The tents in which Gov. Stuart and his guests had been occupying at the time were overturned by strong cyclonic winds, trapping them beneath the heavy fabric. With the governor were Charles Mann of the State Railroad Commission, and Captain Weaver and Colonel Good the First Regiment. In the neighboring tent were the governor's three sisters. The governor and his guests were able to extricate themselves, shaken but uninjured.

At around the same time, lightning struck the tall iron flagpole near the governor's tent, stunning several guardsmen standing nearby. But three other guardsmen weren't so lucky.

 

Lightning Leaps From Tent to Tent

Utter confusion reigned as the sudden storm pummeled Gettysburg. The trolley line between the town and Camp Alexander Hays was knocked out of service, and visitors departing from camp had to seek emergency shelter. Members of the Second Brigade, who were encamped in the lowest field, were hemmed in by the roaring torrents of water which raced down the makeshift streets. When the storm passed, they went in search of their missing comrades. The injured were carried to the hospital tent and examined by regimental medics and physicians who had been summoned from Gettysburg.

More than one hundred guardsmen had been shocked or burned by lightning, and when the night sky cleared, moonlight revealed three men who were killed outright. Those killed were Corporal Cyrus Milton Garver of Company C, Tenth Regiment, from Washington County; Private James Barbe of Company K, Tenth Regiment, of Waynesburg; and Private Clyde Morrison, Company D, Sixteenth Regiment, of Oil City. The dead were immediately taken to the Grand Army Hall in Gettysburg and prepared for burial, and their bodies were returned to their homes by train on Sunday morning. 

Like Lieutenant Morley, Corporal Garver had also been on guard duty when he was struck. He was standing inside the guard tent, next to a steel gun rack, when a blue ball of fire seemed to enter the tent, enveloping it in flame. Garber let out an agonizing cry as he fell to the ground, his head split in two, as if with an axe. His uniform was shred to ribbons, his boots ripped from his feet. His watch was stopped at 9:26 pm. Sadly, Garver's mother, who had recently departed camp after visiting her son, was located in Carlisle and summoned back to Gettysburg to claim the body.

A medic examines the injuries of guardsmen Harry Applegate and Arthur Kline

 

Private Barbe was also inside a tent when lightning struck. While in a sitting position, a bolt struck him on the arm. The electricity coursed through his body, killing him instantly. Several other tents lining the street of Company K were struck by lightning, resulting in numerous injuries. Witnesses recalled that the lightning seemed to pass from tent to tent, striking each one in turn. The body of Private Morrison was discovered near the 16th Infantry hospital tent, face down in the mud, his uniform in tatters. When his body was rolled over, Morrison's forehead bore an angry purple crescent-shaped mark; evidently the bolt of lightning had struck him between the eyes. 

To say that Mother Nature was angry that night is an understatement; she wasn't just angry-- she had gone insane. The lightning acted in strange, unpredictable ways, as if in defiance of all known laws of science. Private Krouse, of Company L, was sitting on a wooden chair inside the hospital tent when he was struck. Though Krouse was severely shocked, everyone else inside the tent escaped injury, even those who were standing near the metal tent poles. Two musicians of the Sixteenth Infantry were inside a tent with their wives when a fireball "seemed to drop at their feet". Though the four were huddled close together, the men were knocked unconscious while their wives were not harmed at all. 

Meanwhile, Privates Quinter, Smith and Strohm of the Sixth Infantry were trying to prevent their tent from being blown over by the wind. All three men were holding onto the metal tent pole when it was struck by a lightning bolt. Miraculously, they suffered only minor burns.

Cpl. Garver's tattered uniform hung in memoriam

 

The Leggings of Doom

On Friday morning, sunrise revealed the staggering extent of the mayhem caused by the storm-- not just in Gettysburg, but around the east coast. In Philadelphia, damages were estimated at $250,000 (nearly $9 million in today's currency). In south New Jersey, over twenty barns burned to the ground after being struck by lightning. Hail and heavy rains obliterated farmers' fields, livestock and fruit orchards along the Ohio River Valley, resulting in an incalculable financial loss; in Addyston, Kentucky, members of the black community stood out in an open field and prayed during the storm, convinced that the end of the world was at hand. In the rapidly-growing city of Fall River, Massachusetts, the downpour swept vast quantities of sand from the hills onto roads and streetcar tracks, immobilizing automobiles, wagons and trolleys alike. The city of 120,000 souls was at a standstill until railroad wrecking cars were able to clear the trolley rails.

Yet, for all the mayhem, the storm miraculously claimed only one life outside of Pennsylvania. So how did lightning manage to kill four members of the Pennsylvania National Guard and injure hundreds more? Did the angry spirits of vanquished rebels exact revenge from beyond the grave? Or did a high power strike down the militia men for irreverently parading and playing on the hallowed soil where seven thousand soldiers had fallen only a few decades earlier?

The most widely-accepted explanation is more mundane-- though every bit as strange. 

Just weeks before Camp Alexander Hays opened, the Pennsylvania National Guard made an ill-fated change to the uniform by issuing new regulation leggings. With two strips of flexible steel running the length of the canvas legging in the back and two more metal strips in the front, ten thousand guardsmen found their legs encased in veritable death traps when the storm broke over Gettysburg. Standing upon the rain-soaked ground, the unlucky men, along with their commanding officers, learned a valuable lesson about electrical conductivity. According to Professor Edwin J. Houston, the former president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the leggings had turned the guardsmen into "human lightning rods".

 

When the bodies of the three dead soldiers were examined, it was discovered that the steel bands around their legs were melted and twisted, the hot metal having burned deep into the flesh. Their skin revealed a variety of strange markings, some in the shape of ferns and flowers, others in the shape of stars and zig-zags. The same injuries were found on other guardsmen who had been seriously shocked, and those who had experienced only minor shocks remarked that their legs had the sensation of standing on sharp needles during the duration of the storm. Those who had the misfortune of standing in puddles were knocked unconscious.

Not every commanding officer was clueless about the cause of the painful needle-like sensations during the storm, and the actions of a few quick-thinking officers undoubtedly saved lives that strange July day in 1908. One such officer was Colonel H.S. Taylor of the Fifth Infantry. When Col. Taylor suspected that the steel bracing of the leggings might be the cause of the guardsmen's discomfort, he ordered his men to remove their leggings at once. He shouted his order to other regiments, even those of which he did not command, and in this manner an untold number of deaths and severe injuries were avoided.

 

Military Denies Blame

There were some, however, who refused to believe that the steel-braced leggings were the cause of the calamity. Captain Elmer Lindsley, quartermaster of the U.S. Army, declared that the amount of steel in each legging was less than an ordinary pocket knife, and that each metal strip was wrapped in paper and covered by canvas. Captain George Eiler, a retired National Guard member who worked for the company that manufactured the uniforms, dismissed the possibility that his employer's leggings posed a threat to the wearers' safety. "They could be no more dangerous than the steel in a woman's corset," he claimed. 

This opinion was also shared by J.H. Bray, the manager of the uniform company's military branch. "I do not know why the slender strips of steel should attract lightning to any greater extent than the metal buttons and other metal parts of a soldier's equipment," he said. "In fact, it would seem that the covering would have the effect of insulation to a certain extent."

However, the greatest dismissal came in mid-August, after a thorough investigation of the tragedy, when Professor Willis L. Moore, Chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau, issued a statement, concluding that "the presence of the steel ribs mentioned as part of the army leggings was probably without influence in effecting the fatal results." And, just like that, the matter was forgotten, leaving the fateful National Guard encampment of 1908 a mere footnote in the long and storied history of Gettysburg.

 

Strange Coincidences

And yet, the mystery remains: If the steel-ribbed leggings played no role in the deaths of Lt. Frank Morley, Cpl. Cyrus Garver, Pvt. James Barbe and Pvt. Clyde Morrison, as the experts insisted, then how and why did it happen? I can't answer those questions, but here's some food for thought, a tasty, little morsel of trivia for the morbidly curious: On July 1, 1863, the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, a 25-year-old private in the 84th New York Infantry received a ghastly head wound courtesy of a rebel minie ball. He would die of his injuries in a military hospital in New Jersey. His name was John O. Morley. 

At Gettysburg National Cemetery, you will find the grave of a 22-year-old soldier from Philadelphia who lost his life on the third day of fighting. His name was Private Robert Morrison, of the 69th Pennsylvania Infantry.

Corporal Cyrus Garver, one of the guardsmen killed by lightning, is buried near his home in Armstrong County. During the Civil War, a young corporal named Joseph Garver died at Camp Dennison in Ohio. This Cpl. Garver belonged to Company M of the 14th Pennsylvania Cavalry-- a regiment made up of boys and young men from Armstrong County. 

In September of 1863, a soldier named Allen Barb was killed at the Battle of Chickamauga. What does this have to do with the death of James A. Barbe in 1908? Allen's great-grandfather was Johann Jacob Barbe, who hailed from the tiny little village of Hochstenbach, Germany, and died in Shenandoah County, Virginia. Private James A. Barbe's great-great-great grandfather was the very same Johann Jacob Barb.

 

 

Sources:

Harrisburg Daily Independent, July 16, 1908.
Philadelphia Inquirer, July 23, 1908.
York Daily, July 25, 1908.
Harrisburg Daily Independent, July 24, 1908.
The Kentucky Post, July 25, 1908.
Fall River Daily Herald, July 25, 1908.
Philadelphia Inquirer, July 25, 1908.
West Chester Record, Aug. 13, 1908.