or more than a century, the fighting that occurred in and around John Kuhn's brickyard was most often a mere footnote in the history of the July 1863 Battle of Gettysburg. Two highly regarded 20th-century histories offer telling examples. General Edward J. Stackpole made no mention of the so-called Brickyard Fight in his popular 1956 book They Met at Gettysburg, and Edwin B. Coddington devoted only two sentences to it in his classic 1968 account, The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command. And so it went, year after year, in book after book about the most chronicled battle in American history.
Why exactly has the Brickyard Fight—which resulted in more than 770 Union and Confederate casualties—been neglected for so long in histories of the battle? The answer is twofold.
Read Full Article »
