Hummelbaugh House

Confederate General William Barksdale died on this farmhouse floor in 1863. His dog starved to death on his grave weeks later.

When Confederate Brigadier General William Barksdale was carried off the field at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863, he had a bullet through his chest, a cannonball wound to his left foot, and a musket ball in his left knee. Union soldiers brought him to Jacob Hummelbaugh's farmhouse on the Taneytown Road, which was the nearest building. He died there the next morning. His last words, recorded by his aide W.R. Boyd, were, "I am killed. Tell my wife and children that I died fighting at my post."

They buried him under a tree behind the Hummelbaugh farmhouse.

Weeks later, Barksdale's widow traveled from Mississippi to recover his body. The legend says she brought the general's dog with her, a bloodhound who had followed Barksdale through the war. When the widow reached the grave, the dog lay down on the mound and refused to leave. The widow returned to Mississippi with her husband's coffin. The dog stayed. He would not eat. He howled at night, all night, loud enough that the Hummelbaugh family could hear him from inside the farmhouse. He died on the grave a few weeks later, probably of starvation.

This is the part of the story that the National Park Service does not officially confirm but that every battlefield guide in Gettysburg will tell you about Hummelbaugh. The bloodhound is why people come.

Visitors to the Hummelbaugh House at night have reported hearing a dog howl behind the farmhouse, always coming from the same spot behind the tree line where Barksdale's temporary grave used to be. Barksdale's remains were exhumed in January 1867 and reinterred at Greenwood Cemetery in Jackson, Mississippi. The howling reports started sometime after that.

Battlefield guide Gregg Clemmer has told the story on tours for years. He's careful to frame the dog legend as folklore rather than documented fact. The howling reports, though, keep coming in, year after year, and he's heard too many to wave them off. In a 2018 Gettysburg Times interview he described a July night tour when four visitors stopped mid-sentence at the same moment, looking toward the tree line. A long, low howl. Then silence. No dog around for a quarter mile.

The Hummelbaugh House itself still stands on the Taneytown Road, privately owned and not open to the public. You can walk the ground around it as part of the National Military Park. There's no marker for the dog. There's a marker for Barksdale, about where his temporary grave was, which you can find if you know to look for the tree line.

If there's anything haunting Hummelbaugh, it isn't the general. Barksdale got home.