CWL---Remembramce Day 2010: Silence at Little Round Top; Communion With Father Corby

Immediately after the Remembrance Day parade, The Ninth Pennsylvania Reserves, Company A, a Civil War living history and reenactment unit, marches from Ziegler's Grove to the saddle between the Round Tops. At the monument, an image of which was on the 2008 Licensed Battlefield Guide Exam, the military and civilian members and their guests, remember the Ninth with a wreath and appropriate remarks.

The other Pennsylvania Reserve units, First through Twelfth are remember during a march which begins at 8:00am on Remembrance Day. The combined Pennsylvania Reserve reenactment units march from Big Round Top, where the 12th, 11th and 10th Regiments have monuments and then through Plum Run valley with the Brigadier General Samuel Crawford and the 6th Pennsylvania Reserve monuments and then to the Wheatfield and Houck's Ridge where the remaining monuments are located.

As 2nd Corps Federal troops were marching toward the Rose farm's wheatfield, a 29 year old priest addressed the Irish Brigade. As he stood upon a rock, possibly the rock upon which his monument stands today, Father Corby prayed, gave absolution and warned the troops that any individual who did not perform their duty would be denied a Christian burial. Within an hour, nearly 200 hundred members of the Irish brigade would be dead or mortally wounded. Fourteen years after his death, Father Corby was honored with a statue on the battlefield at an October 1910 dedication ceremony. During the afternoon of Remembrance Day 2010, a Catholic Mass occurred and about 50 battlefield visitors participated.

Photographer: Rea Andrew Redd [Civil War Librarian]